In a world of tile-matching puzzle games, a big part of the dopamine hit you get making a match comes from the VFX — colorful explosions, cute popping effects, things that feel snappy and rewarding.
These effects can often also contribute to the visual chaos on screen, and balancing these two aspects has proven to be an interesting journey! As part of our devlogs, we wanted to take a bit of a dive into how that journey went for us, working on Cylinder!
Before we began taking polish passes at the VFX, there weren’t many present in the project, and those that were already there were definitely in need of some upgrades.
Those of us on the art team took on the task of learning Unity’s particle system, effectively from the ground up, to get this project looking as good as we could! With how our game works, a lot of these effects happen alongside each other, or even at the same time. So, we had to make sure they were all simple, but punchy.
The effects we made can be divided into 3 categories: Match, Attack, and Environment. The majority of our effect work was in the Match & Attack categories, with Environment VFX coming more towards the end of development. A big topic of our back-and-forths has been making sure the effects were timed well — calling back to them needing to be snappy and rewarding. We spent a long time staring at the effects, changing their speed or order, playing them over, and over, and over, and over, and over…
Huh? Oh, sorry. Got a bit too reflective there for a second. Anyway, in the end (and thanks to a lot of tutorials and studying other effects available online), we wound up having a nice little repertoire of particles, and they built the foundation of what the rest of our effects ended up being based on!
As for the environment VFX, a lot of that was custom shadergraph in tandem with particle effect work. We spent a lot of our time on these effects just learning how to utilize shadergraph, and leveraging the resources we found to create the effects we needed. I think it served as another reminder for me that reaching out and looking to the Unity community’s resources is pivotal in our learning experience, and I felt like the shadergraph effects we made really show the love put into the learning.
The particle effects we made for the environments had to tie in with the visuals we’d already defined for those environments, along with whatever shaders we made as well. This didn’t prove to be very difficult, as we had a strong foundation of concept art & environment art for most of the levels. Most of these effects actually ended up reusing a lot of the base systems we’d already created previously, as well.
As all of that came together, we quickly realized that we had created something very . . . chaotic. During sections like multiplayer matches, or when a big puzzle suddenly dropped into completion, we’d find that the noise was almost too much! And then, as the game’s scope expanded, and our designers utilized our FX in new places, the insanity only increased. All of these things combined made us recently go into a more refined polish pass, landing what you see below!
That’s a quick and simple version of our VFX journey! There was a ton of frustration, reworking, and iterations of all the effects you saw in just these GIFs/videos alone (heck, some of them might even be different by the time you read this!). If you’re wanting an article that’s a bit more technical, keep an eye out for the next art team article we put out, where you’ll get to read a deep dive into our lighting pipeline!
Thanks for reading, and we can’t wait to see you in Cylinder,
available to wishlist now on Steam!
