rose
haired
sheep
💫 Magebound
about
An isometric magic-based beat ‘em up game. Made as part of a game development course by a six-person team in five weeks. Playable in browser with WebGPU support. I handled the majority of the visual effects as well as the game’s music.
tech
I created all of the base spell effects using Unity’s VFX Graph and Shader Graph tools. Some parts of the assets ended up reused because of simplicity and the time crunch, but overall this resulted in eighteen unique effects.
audio
The game has the player switch between three different states in order to cast different spells, so I wanted to create a unique music theme for each of them. Hovewer, because it was expected the state would switch often, I opted for a single ‘base theme’ onto which I would layer a secondary track composed of a similar melody, just changing in instruments, number and length of notes, and other small details. The track visualisations are below, and you can listen to them online!
retrospection
what did i do right?
The songs are still some of the best ones I have made in my opinion, especially Stormcatcher. Playing around with different instruments and varying note composition in the scope of a singular melody was great fun. It also ended up working excellently as a reminder to the player of which elemental state they were currently in, in addition to the HUD colours.
I think some of the visual effects hold up pretty well, especially the basic attacks ones. Using a custom crescent-shaped particle effect (plus a lightning bolt one!) did wonders for some much-needed visual flair and cartoonification.
what would i do different?
A tighter connection with the programmers on the team would have been useful. Since I was working mostly isolated, I ended up incorporating multiple states into some of my effects (for example the fireball projectile and structure) within a single VFX graph so that it could be easily instantiated with no additional work on the other end. Looking back, it would have been considerably less trouble to create fewer less complicated and more malleable assets that could then be composed and reused by the coders with my help to achieve the same result in a smaller time frame.