Slime Impact Particle

When interacting with our enemies, we wanted to push the gooey aesthetics to include areas of user feedback. While we had FX for sword swings and projectiles we didn’t have any tangible in-world feedback to show the Slimes were being damaged. To enhance the user-feedback in combat we decided to create a slime-impact particle.

To create this particle, we utilized a sprite sheet composed of various frames of a goey explosion. Each frame would play out through a simple sprite emitter upon impact. While the spritesheet could have been hand drawn we opted for a different approach utilizing Blender.

In Blender we created a particle simulation of a burst of particles with a short lifespan and small radius. We gave them velocity and force to create an outward explosion effect. From there we changed the emitter properties from sprites to a sampled object, that object being a Metaball. Metaballs have the unique property of ‘uniting’ upon intersection, giving them a gooey or liquidy look when overlapped.

From there we applied a reflective material to the simulation to allow us to capture a wide range of lighting values and depth. After this set up was done, we captured each frame as a flat image with a black background to utilize as the individual frames of our sprite sheet.

After some tweaking in Photoshop we had our finished sprite sheet! We found this approach to be pretty effective, and also allowed us to create quick iterations and different seeds of the same animation on the fly.

- Jamie Zerillo