In our game Rune Mages a key mechanic is to combine runes to make different spells. But what do you get if you combine a fire rune with a water rune? We decided that it would be a water spray on fire. This spell has greater range then the water spray spell but is also cone shaped and it does a lot of damage. Unlike the water spray I didn’t have any problem selling the effect as a “fire spray” since it’s a lot easier to make fire look like fire. I know that fire is blue when it is very hot and I used that knowledge when I made the spell. When I started making the spell I simply made a copy of the water spray I had done earlier and started to increase the lifetime of the particles and changed the speed of the particles. I also added a sort of intense beam at the start the was blue to give the impression that this was a very hot fire. I also gave the fire a blur tint at its start but it then change color over its lifetime to a more yellow then red color. I then changed the color of the droplets from the water spray to yellow to transform them to ember instead of droplets.
When I was satisfied with the result and the effect felt powerful, we implemented the spell into the game. This is when I noticed that the effect didn’t look like it did when I made it. I was afraid that there had been a rollback of some sort and this wasn’t the latest version of the spell, but since I had only made one prefab this was impossible. I soon realized that the reason it looked so different from when I made it was because of the camera effects we were using. The camera effects aren’t in use while in the scene (build mode) but are when you play the game or are in play mode in Unity. These effect were implemented during the time I was working on Burning Hands spell so I didn’t realize what that the spell would look different depending of which mode you were in in Unity. I tried to make it look more like the original with the new camera effects but I couldn’t achieve the same result. The final result doesn’t look that bad but the original had a nicer gradient change from blue to yellow to red.
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