VFX, Tech Art and Tools

[p]Our ambitious student project Spire of Chaos: Arcana Unleashed allowed us to explore aspects of game development we never had the chance to experience until now. When creating a game with a team of 25 people over the course of seven months, creating tools can greatly aid the game’s production. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the tools we’ve created for our project as well as more information about the various visual effects (VFX) which enhance Spire of Chaos: Arcana Unleashed.[/p][p][/p][h3]Tools[/h3][p]Some technical details of our project have to be highlighted to be able to understand the work of our team members who created our project’s tools. Some of them were created directly in Unreal Engine 5 and specifically for this project in order to aid production. Our data management is done through Notion, so a link had to be made between our game engine and our databases. We also had to be careful to clearly expose parameters for using the various tools throughout production because artists and programmers do not have the same expectations and needs when using these tools. As such, using clear organization and documentation for the use of the tools to make them more accessible to each department was crucial. Developpers need to constantly keep their user in mind, something typically referred to as user driven development.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3][/h3][h3]Stained Glass Systems[/h3][p]Spire of Chaos: Arcana Unleashed has a very unique visual identity inspired by several themes, including Art Nouveau and Magical Girls. To keep with these themes, we’ve created many stained glass windows in the environments, which creates a neat fantasy ambience. Since it was an important element to our game’s identity, we developed a tool to procedurally create light rays which allows for complete control over the game’s lighting. Our artists thus had control over colour, light intensity and many other factors through the tool’s parameters which made the production of environments much easier and allow our artists to be more efficient.[/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p][/p][p]We decided to use Unreal Engine’s Lumen system for the game’s lighting, which seemed to us to be most appropriate for our ambitions and production criteria. However, this workflow creates some optimization issues which we had to be conscious of throughout development to make sure performance wasn’t affected in the end. Beyond the creation of tools, solid communication between programming and artist teams was once again essential to developing our workflows. Programmers need to understand artists’ wishes and intentions within the game engine in order to facilitate production.[/p][p][/p][h3]Visual Effects[/h3][p]A combat-heavy game inspired by Magical Girls will inevitably contain many visual effects, such as particle systems. These are needed for characters’ attacks amongst many other things, whether they are our heroine’s or our enemies’. Each attack thus has a unique set of VFX, varied between which character is using them - which is a lot to produce in a limited amount of time.[/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p][/p][p]Because of the iterative process of creating a game, we had to figure out a way to make sure the VFX weren’t affected by modifications to objects or characters to optimize production. Because of this constant back and forth, the VFX artist’s job is never really done until the final version of each model. This is an essential aspect of production however and to ease it, the visual effects were directly tied to characters’ rigs instead of being manually placed in blueprints or game objects. This way, changes to characters would minimally impact the work done on VFX and allowed for a better workflow.[/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p][/p][p]Spire of Chaos: Arcana Unleashed has various distinct environments each with their own ambience, with each level having its own lighting. The work done on VFX thus had to take these lighting differences into account and this was done through multiple experiments throughout development to keep visuals coherent throughout the game.[/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p]Despite our best efforts and extensive tool systems, changes happen all the time when developing a game and so the key remains a solid communication. Each team needs to remain aware of current and planned changes to aspects that might affect their department, and this was crucial to time and production management for our VFX artists. Solid documentation was also very important to stay up to date with all aspects of production.[/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][h3]Bug Report System[/h3][p]Lastly, we’ve also created a system for bug reports that has been extremely useful and that we wished to highlight. This tool was created to ease the work on QA (quality assurance) and allows for a direct link between Unreal Engine, our game engine, Notion, our management and database tool, and Discord, our communication tool. The bug report system allows Unreal to connect to web APIs to send data to those different websites - however, Notion has strict limits on the size of data it can recieve, so we had to be careful not to include files that were too large, especially video. This tool being produced in-house allowed us to respect all those kinds of constraints which we had to respect.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3][/h3][h3]Q&A[/h3][p]If you had to choose a Tarot card, which one represents you best?[/p][p][/p][p]Luc: the 8 of Wands, since that card represents the energy that propels me ever forwards to accomplish my goals.[/p][p][/p][p]Frédéric: the Wheel of Fortune, since there will always be positive and negative events in life. We need to remember life is a cycle and not let the bad times drag us down.[/p][p][/p][p]Raphaël: Temperance, since it represents balance between instinct and reason, finding an equilibrium between opposites.[/p][p][/p][p]Malo: the Jack of Pentacles, since it represents hard work, studies and the love of learning, which really resonates with me.[/p][p][/p][p]Which is the best part of Spire of Chaos: Arcana Unleashed in your opinion?[/p][p]Luc: the stained glass windows, the fact they’re interactive with the tool created for them, how the godrays’ colour affects objects around our environments, is all very impressive to me.[/p][p][/p][p]Frédéric: the artistic freedom we have in this project, I’ve been able to do a lot of exploration in creating the VFX, and I was able to work on different things like fire, water and nature effects.[/p][p][/p][p]Raphaël: I believe the game is full of great ideas with calculated risks, we’ve always had ambition but we’re able to push through and accomplish what we dreamt of.[/p][p][/p][p]Malo: the production time over several months which allows a lot of freedom to try things out that we’ve never had a chance to, this project really allowed us to experiment and discover new things within video game development.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p]