Particle systems, these are systems which are typically quite small or don’t occur to often while playing a game. Even though they are very interesting to look at and understand how they were made, particle systems can easily use up a lot of computing power. Particle systems literally add sparks to the project; but the impact that they can have on the player is almost as big as the impact they can have on the performance.

Like with audio and shaders, particle systems help emphasize or bring attention to something that is happening within the game, with something like charging up and attack or a explosion particle system. These particle systems can really help add a little extra to the project and make it appeal to more people.

I had no previous experience with particle systems, and in Unity it was relatively easy to get a particle system up and running. There were a lot of customizations and adjustments that you can make to the particle system and ultimately is led to creating a simple particle effect for the exhaust of a rocket or jet. I really enjoyed playing around with the different settings and visualizing all the minute changes I had made. And although I think playing around with the options on a particle system is fun and it might lead to some nice particle effects I will look into some guides on how to create some particle effects to see what approach people have when trying to create a particle effect, the optimizations they make if any, and finally some nice particle effects.

With regards to the progress of our project I feel we are still a bit behind even though we have most of the components of the game most of them have some issues to be fixed, we still need to merge our work and then test it. Also for a few weeks I have been asking for a schedule or some document from the animation team so that we can have a concrete day for when things will start getting delivered as we only have received the initial map layout and a mesh for one of the monsters, and already I am seeing potential problems with the map file, I just hope they are also seeing them as well. I also need to perform better as a group leader as I have slacked off with keeping our project management plan up to date, checking the progress of the team and to keep pushing them and myself forward as we are getting much closer to the deadline.

For next week I would like to have received a majority of the assets from the animation team and have our game merged and up to date with our project management plan.