Hello, friends! Shiny Brandon here and I’m the VFX Artist on Inkbound. If you see a sparkle or
an explosion, odds are I made that!
I’m here to talk about Star Captain VFX. We’ll also look into the general process of making FX.

CONCEPT

In most cases, art assets of any kind get concepted before they are worked on. In the wacky
world of VFX on Inkbound, we mostly work off of gut feeling. Most of the time I get a description
of the ability and the name. This is enough to get the gears turning for visualization in my brain.
But in some cases, my brain fizzles out and short circuits. That’s when I call upon our Art
Director, Will.
Together we either throw out some options, request a design change that can more easily be
worked into FX, or Will sketches me out a concept to go off of.

CREATION

Once we have all the ingredients, the creation can begin.

Most of the time I use Unity’s default particle system for everything. In rare cases where I need
more control over things, I’ll use VFX Graph.

All of the VFX in Inkbound also use custom shaders that I create using Shader Graph, which is
a great node based shader creation tool built into Unity. Perfect for visual people, like myself,
who cannot read or write.

I aim for the main “Thing” of the effect first. Like for the Star Captain sky laser, I went for the
beam first and got the timing down.

Timing is very key for us in a multiplayer turn based game (We still goof sometimes). We aim to
have all FX wrap up within 1 - 1.5 seconds and sooner in a lot of cases!

We never want to bog down combat with long and drawn out FX or animations, so it’s a tight
balance between making FX snappy, but also impactful.

In general I’d say FX for an ability can take half a day to 1.5 days to make, it just depends how
much iteration we do on it. Sometimes the first pass works great, other times we have to sit and
iterate on the FX all day.

Once we are happy with the look, we get it all slotted in and ready to ship!

SC ABILITIES OVERVIEW

Let’s take a look at each of the Star Captain abilities and I’ll give a rundown on the process.

Chillazer

I knew this ability was a sort of Star Wars blaster, it bounces, and applies
frostbite. So it was pretty easy to come together. We already had the tech for bouncing
projectiles thanks to Chain Lightning and Ricochet. I just stuck to the Frostbite color
palette and added in some sparkles with a bit of frost.

Mission Leader

Buff abilities are interesting because they are player centered and need
to communicate that something changed about the player. I wanted this one to look cool
without being too overwhelming on the eyes. Colin initially gave me the wireframe idea
so I ran with it! This one was fun because I had some shader stuff to solve. I had to
create a donut shaped mask that would reveal the wireframe and also have the
wireframe shift in color from the start to the end. So technically the wireframe is a static
decal placed on a static plane mesh. The only thing that moves is the donut shaped
mask that grows to reveal the wireframe underneath. I also added some pixely looking
particles that shoot up from the center. I went with the blue/pink color shift since this
ability swaps between adding AP and shielding. Very fun one to make!

Cryoclasm

My initial thought for this one was similar to Lissandra Ult from LoL, but that
idea quickly shifted to a giant orbital freeze beam after tossing ideas around with Colin.
As soon as I knew that was the plan, I had to request a custom “beep boop” animation
from our Animator, Lee. That way I could have a little anticipation with the orbital cannon
targeting FX on the ground. This is probably my favorite ability in the game right now
thanks to the target locking FX. The giant beam is just the cherry on top. Game feel is
great here and I’d like to leverage some slightly longer animations, like the “beep boop”,
in the future to build up some bigger FX.

Sentinel Drone Passive

Our master VFX tech programmer, Matt, had to come up with a
system similar to the Clairvoyant orb so we could fire FX from a source separate from
the player. I didn’t make the Drone model, but I handled the beam FX, spawn in and out
animations, and the idle FX. We wanted this to be pretty subtle overall since so many
drones could be on screen, and Will helped me come up with the retro thruster vibe. I
think it came together very well and definitely does it’s job as a subtle drone joining the
fight to deal some extra damage.

CONCLUSION

Well I think that’s about it! Thank you so much for sifting through my scattered thoughts with me.
I’m ShinyBrandon on Discord and Skweejji in the Twitch streams. Feel free to shoot me any
questions about VFX stuff and I’ll get back to you! Luckily I love discussing VFX, so I’m happy to
reply.

SEE YOU NEXT TIME, INKBOUNDERS!