Watch the awesomeness that is what me and the rest of my sophomore year of game art students created. this is a montage, created by me, of a series of the epic levels we all created for a racing game.

You know you want to play it. Admit it. It looks fun, right?

Attract trailer research

are you ready to make a pretty video?



For better or worse my level is done (not seen above), and I'm now going to make an attract video similar to what is in the embedded video. Basically this is a video meant to make one want to play the leverl I made.

So looking at the video above, I realize there are certain elements I will need to capture to make an equally awesome video.

some major selling points of awesome in this video are the feelings of speed and scope. you can "feel" the car going quickly. The video also shows a lot of the awesome vistas of the game. It looks good because it shows how cool playing this level would be, showing the major buildings, and how one might play the game.

Car HUD

Like any good car, a speedometer is a necessity for a vehicle based game. Since i'm making one of those I have been researching ways in which to make a HUD. this display would show game important information, and in a vehicle game this is usually approximately 4 things.

Speed
Lap time
total level time
and if one's car can be destroyed some type of health indication.

Often times a gps map is a nice addition, but given the limited time remaining to create this display, for the time being I will not worry much about that.

so first as homage to my modeled vehicle, I looked up honda civic dashboards from the 90s:

Though these are nice enough in design, it seemed complicated to implement in game format. maybe by looking into HUDs from other games, I could see how one might work.

Hmmm.... looks like there are many ways to do it, but the hud rarely seems to show gas and rpm. I guess that makes sense, as those aren't really displaying necessary information for going fast. So with that in mind, what might I do for my own personal HUD? the honda i made, ha a dashboard display, most notable for its thre piece display, but making one of those for my hud, may be showing more information than i really need it to. perhaps better would be to build my hud based on my  level theme.

so that's what I've decided to do. So, now i bring you the stuff of some people's nightmares; MY HUD!

Particle Effect

Following a bit of cannon fire, which is relatively hard to see, I drive to the point in my level where my main particle effect of extreme damage is activated. A massive cloud of dust spray and dirt clouds fog your view, after a Ferris wheel crashes down and  opens the level.

This effect, though hard to see while in action, has a good deal of actions all happening at once. There is a gpu particle effect, of dust spraying upwards, with collision so they collide against and spray on the falling wheel, and landscape. This was a fun and annoying effect to achieve, tweaking values continuously inside of the velocity and scale of the cylinder location module.

the other main element is the explosion of dust in an expanding and fading ring. this has a color change over life, and a scale by life. as it expands out over its surface only cylinder location, it grows larger and moves up wards slightly, as it becomes whiter, and less opaque as its alpha values increase.

needless to say... particles are fun... and annoying.

So i have a very particular particle effect which occurs in my level. I have a very large object hit the ground and this then results in a displacement wave of dust, which would come in many forms. firstly there would be the dust plumes

https://youtu.be/sK50So-yYRU?t=28

https://youtu.be/sK50So-yYRU?t=28

when an object crashes down, it sends dust outwards and out, which results in said dust sort of "mushrooming" up. this creates the main shockwave effect, of a growing and shrinking ring of dust explosions.

second, the object falling proceeds to roll. this is going to create a dust trail in its wake, as the ground below the object is displaced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSqlEjHVwYg&list=PL8_R6XQMdqJ5YZP639tAhv-ExqNIttCit&index=5


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfL8PtDxOP8

finally, the dust would float in he air, drifting downwards as it attempts to settle.

http://eat3d.com/free/dust_particles