Omar Briceno Studio

Solar Showdown was the Brigham Young University (BYU) student capstone game project of 2023. It's a two-player Real-time Strategy Game where the objective is to build up enough solar energy to power your mega-laser and destroy the other base. My contributions consisted of creating the visual effects for the mega-lasers that appear in both the opening sequence and the endgame. It was in this project where I learned that a successful execution of VFX in games required a profound comprehension of emitters (in this case being Unreal's Niagara), parameter influenced shaders, and game programming logic for integration into the game-play.

Believe it or not, making the Niagara System for the laser was the easiest part in all that I've worked on. It is basically an emitter that shoots particles on one direction, add a couple of mesh emitters with exposed material parameters for emission and opacity, and with enough layering to enhance the force of the laser you will get something that looks satisfying to shoot your opponent with. There are two players to choose from in the game, so I thought it would be great to make two distinct styles for each laser. And so as part of the creative process, I designed all the aspects of the lasers around the styles of their respective characters. The one showcased above belongs to the "Botanist" character. Since her design consisted of mostly organic shapes, I had to make sure the shape of the laser also seemed organic.

The above is the explosion that activates when the opposing teams base is hit by the mega-laser and destroyed. This is the effect that is going to signal the game is over, hence I made the explosion to be as much of a spectacle as possible. I designed each stage of the explosion, and sequenced it as if I were telling a story. All stages and layers of the explosion had their own challenges; for one layer in particular, I used my knowledge in Houdini to create the fractured base, and process the pieces through a rigid-body dynamics (RBD) simulation. After importing the RBD animation file into Unreal, I then had to figure out how to put everything together.

For example: when the player lost I had to program the player-base to swap the gameplay model to the RBD skeleton, and play the animation. When firing the laser, I needed to create Unreal curves to animate the laser windup, firing and cool-down, and integrate their respective trigger functions within the player-base blueprint. The entire process of figuring out how to assemble all pieces necessary to achieve this real-time effect felt very satisfying once I saw the final result in the game.

If you'd like to try the game yourself, I have the link to download it on steam right here, so you can view the explosions yourself!