Vfx portfolio - Steelsilk championship

Vfx Portfolio 

Hello my name is Riccardo I'm currently studying Vfx for video games at Bigrock School and I'd love to show you my entry for The Rookies Awards 2024.

Steel Silk Championship

Steel Silk Championship was the thesis project for our course in videogame, it was made with Unreal Engine 5.3 and it's a roguelite cooperative shooter based on games like vampire survivors where you need to survive hordes of enemies while gaining upgrades each level.

My role in this project was doing the vfx, textures and help with their optimization.

Materials

Every material instance had to be easy to read while also providing a lot of customization.

Textures

One of my supervisors taught me that for optimization reason it's wasteful to have too many textures around in the folder, so in order to have lots of images but with little space consumed I had to create packs of textures. 

A packed texture can provide me a different image for every channel so instead of having four different textures I can have all of them with the weight of one.

Most of the textures were pngs that I've found on google, a few were made by me and others were took from the VFExtra pack of Niels Dewitte.

Hazards

Besides enemies, there are other things players should watch out for.

The poison mushroom has an area effect that damages you over time, it's easy to notice but not so easy to avoid since the swamp is not very accessible.

The poison cloud is splitted in two, one with the sprites made in niagara and the other is in a blueprint with the body and the decal. The poison flower has a dissolve effect to help it appear and disappear.

In the desert level you will find tornadoes roaming the map, they will hurt and slow you down while inside their area, make sure to not get stuck in one while being aimed by a scorpion.

For the tornado I used three different meshes for the body and two different sprites for the dust. The material is made with a fresnell and an erosion effect fed with custom textures.

In the third level you are going to see lots of warning signs, make sure to keep moving otherwise you might get hit by a falling rock which does a lot of damage.

The falling rock vfx, like the poison mushroom is splitted in 2 parts. The destruction effect is simply the spiky rock mesh falling and once it hits the ground there is an explosion of dust and rock shrapnels with a collision component.

Characters Skills

It's very important to define what kind of character you are going to be in a videogame, for this project we decided that since there were only two they had to be the opposite of one another, one frail but fast and one slow but tanky.

Weaver

This character may die with a few hits but that is if they can catch you! The fast spider is doted with a machine gun and the abilty to dash quickly through the battlefield while also incinerating the enemies thanks to its fire dash.

Here the fast spider uses its normal dash, a jump with a sprint mid air. it was made with a trail and a cloud of particles that should give the idea of feathers.

The fast spider's second ability is the fire dash. The idea was to make it look like a fireball so i used the same mesh of the spider in its dash pose with a trail of fire sprites following it.

Goliath

Being slow is not a problem for the heavy spider since most of the enemies are going to blow up before reaching you and even if they get close you can still push them back thanks to your shield. 

The first skill of the heavy spider is a force shield that pushes away the enemies . It's made by two spheres 

The second skill attracts nearby enemies before vaporizing them with an energy blast.

Bullets and hits Vfx

The weapons used by the player characters are a machine gun for Weaver and a rocket launcher for Goliath.

Weaver attack

For the machine gun the idea was a laser with high repetition. It was made with a blue ribbon and a purple sprite at the tip. When the player hits the enemy a bright crossed circle pop ups, the effect is a group of sprites mixed togheter, nothing fancy.

Goliath attack

Obviously if you have a character that resembles a tank the main weapon should be a cannon. The bullet is a modified ribbon with a sprite at the tip. When Goliath hits an enemy it explodes, that vfx is a combination of sprites with flipbook animations.

Thank you very much for the interest I hope you liked my work.