While at Jagex, I worked the game Transformers Universe. This game has a lot of history.
I joined late 2012 when Jagex still were developing their own engine for the game, this of course came with its own particle tool that I helped develop.
Jagex’ own engine later got scrapped and we moved onto Unity. I had no previous experience with Unity but it ended up becoming one of my favourite game engines to date!
Transformers Universe was an online PVP tactical MOBA-style web-browser game where the visual VFX language was key for readability of player abilities. It was very important you can tell what ability the other player are using, to either stay away or time your attack!
It was really fun to develop this type of VFX language for abilities and it was super challenging to try to make the VFX stand out and be unique. Each Transformer had a handfull of abilities that had to be unique, adhere to one of three different damage types, faction and their personality, not to forget their vehicle-form abilities as well!
Each ability in the video has a short description of what it does and we almost free hands when it came to creating the VFX. Usually bigger and more impactful the better – but it still had to be readable!
I love Unity’s ease of use while still powerful and real flexible. If I find there’s something I can’t do out of the box in Unity I can usually easily write some C# and fix whatever I wanted to do. As a VFX Artist in Unity, knowing how to do programming is key in my opinion. I wouldn’t be able to do much without it!
I find it limiting to either rely on someone else to do the programming for you or forever stay bound by the off-the-shelf-tools.