In early 2021, while I was working at Thunderful Development, I was called in to help finish up work on the action platformer The Gunk. Over a period of about three weeks I helped polish up the game to a state closer to release, by providing tools for level designers and creating VFX for the most important parts of the game.

Play

The absorb effect was the effect I iterated on the most - it represents the primary action the player performs while playing the game, and so it had to look as good as possible.

It’s made up of two parts - one is a dynamic particle system made with Niagara, and the other is a transparent spline mesh with a distortion effect that deforms to imbue momentum to the “swoop” of the effect.

The effect gets an extra layer added to it when absorbing the titular Gunk.

The waterfall tool was a blueprint creation that allowed level artists to quickly place a waterfall anywhere in a level, and instantly having it create particle foam wherever the waterfall intersects with the level.

This is done in the particle system by having each particle check its distance from the level SDF, and the particle deletes itself if it is too far from any geometry. Waterfalls then have a fixed rendering cost, as they only spawn particles at creation.

The lifeforce explosion effect is best viewed in the video above, but here is a still image of it for demonstration.

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