Particle effects

hey...I've been experimenting in ParticleIllusion to try and create abstract visual shapes for the protagonist's special attacks and feedback patterns in the background that will presnt the different phases of the protag's health. ParticleIllusion is a graphics application that will allow me to arbiturary set animated graphics and place them into a particle emitter. I'm aiming to produce some effects that will have some sort of psychological affect on the player [e.g. when the character gets attacked by an enemy, the particles will respond violently and distort, changing shape and colour with more damage [alternative to using a health bar]. This feature is not used just for aesthetic value, but also can ascribe feelings and identify them to the character's inner states.



so... This is me getting used to ParticleIllusion and just quickly experimenting with different particle emitters. I started to make a soul orb thing that you would get after killing an enemy and started to combine different effects and make super-emitters for some of the backgrounds.



I had some problems in rendering the particle effects without the black default background when exported as a avi file. I needed the transparency because these effects would be overlayed on other objects inside flash. I think to solve this I would have to export the effect frame-by-frame as PNGs, I would then go into Flash and import all the pngs for that effect and convert it into a symbol, argh sounds tediuous but it will work for what i want to achieve in the background.



I am currently working on 2 things that I believe would make the background more defined to make the spaces within the parallax be more grounded in realism, but still reaching for the sky [bit like how Johnathan Blow defines a 'thought projecture world', these are:

1. Level Design skecthes will be loosly/expressively painted in photoshop [speed paintings] and imported into the parallax background, but before that, I might do some photoshop mockups to help capture the right composition and mood. Being the furthest plane on the parallax, it will move be scrolling the slowest.
2. I've been thinking on how the design of the background would induce fear within the player...I would have to think of intergrating particle effects with a dark, tim burtonesque style background or maybe using allegorical figures of death...hmm anyways I will probabily show you some screenshots of these in the next post.