Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Hey there! So, I checked out your game effect, and it's got some cool stuff going on! here are a few thoughts: Tell a Clear Story: Without the presentation, it's kinda hard to figure out what's happening. Think about adding some elements that make it easier to follow the start, middle, and end of the story. Brighten Up the Start: That star falling is a neat idea, but it took me a sec to notice it. A little glow could make it pop right from the get-go. Size: That closing sphere looks cool, but it seems a bit small compared to what I expected. It should probably cover the character and enemy, like a proper sphere of influence. Consistency is Key: The transition looks good, but it should match the size of the closing sphere for a smoother flow. Spice Up the Shapes: Those shapes don't really scream danger right now. Maybe elongate them and give 'em a spiky vibe to make 'em more threatening as they come down. Color Coordination: Keep an eye on your colors. Make sure they're consistent and play nicely together to amp up the impact. Give it a Punchy Ending: It'd be cool to have a strong finish to show it's an attack or whatever. Adds a nice touch of drama. Brighten Things Up Some parts of the effect are a bit hard to see because they're not bright enough. Let's crank up the brightness so everything stands out better. So yeah, overall, you're onto something awesome! Maybe start by roughing out the effects with basic shapes to get a better sense of where you're headed. Can't wait to see where you take this! Keep up the good work!
• First of all, well done for submitting your project, even though you weren’t able to finish you clearly accomplished a lot and that is something to be proud of! Things that went well: 1. Great research and reference breakdown helping you to understand the effect you're recreating properly 2. You clearly have in-depth knowledge of the material editor and how to use it with Niagara. I do think some of the materials are slightly more complicated than they need to be e.g. having normals maps on unlit translucent materials, generally, that isn’t adding much as your refraction isn’t visible with a flat grey background 3. You look to have great control over Niagara, being able to create complex movements for your particles There are a few areas I would look to focus on in your future projects/ if you wanted to work back into this piece: 1. Be careful of the poly count on your meshes, your stars are really highpoly for the size and silhouette 2. Looking at your reference, I feel like you have a few mistranslations in your work. The first thing that stands out to me is your blue hemisphere 'build-up main' should be the same stage as your 'galaxy dome'. As you have separated them, it feels like a bit of a disconnect to where it came from. it kind of appears out of nowhere which is not what you want in gameplay as it will catch the player completely off guard and most likely make them feel hard done by. I say this as it feels like some kind of trapping spell, which isn't really sign-posted beforehand. 3. As the effect is based around light, having more sprite-based lens flares and baked-in chromatic aberration could really help enhance the visuals of the effect. I know you have subtle chromatic aberration already but it's not that easy to control in engine as it’s a universal thing. Baking it into your textures or creating a material function for the effect can allow you to control the strength based on the size of the things or keyframe it in BP/LS through a material parameter collection. Ultimately greater control over things like this will allow you to experiment and enhance your visuals much more! Overall, this is a really promising effect and it really is a shame you didn’t manage to finish! That being said I would love to see where you go with it and how you can push it further! If you would like more feedback on this or future projects you can reach out to me on LinkedIn: ‘Ethan Gangotra’ and I will do my best to help! Best of luck with the rest of the university and with the rest of the competition!🙂 👏
• You have provided a very thorough breakdown of what you would like to achieve. This sets a good foundation and allows you to focus on the technical side how to implement the desired effect. The technical implementation seems sound, though issues like a higher res texture on the projected stars or visible UV tearing on the dome shape could have been avoided. The look development leaves a few things to be desired. Try work more with colour and contrast, the current version seems a little low on contrast and lacks visual impact. Look into the 7 Animation Principles for Tweens and transitions, give them some live by adding ease in/outs, some arcs, a snap - anything to make it more impactful. The stars at the end could live with ranomization in scale but also initial orientation. For the final presentation I'd recommend to provide more context to your effect. Effects never live in a vacuum. Placing it in a (even very simple) environment, maybe even adding a dummy character would allow you to clarify scale, but also add lights/light flashes and their interaction with the scene. This would provide a frame of reference and make a bug impact on how your work is perceived.
• Nice project and great effort towards achieving a complex effect and its implementation. There are many key elements to the effect which is great to see, perhaps some of them could use a little colour variation and more emissive elements to add some punch to the effect. Maybe a light particle emitter would help a well. I have also felt that different elements were slightly more or less stylized and didn’t quite fit together to create a well-balanced effect. I would also suggest revisiting the timing of the elements to make the effect more punchy and give it more impact. Overall – great work and very cool to see the effect from idea to implementation. Also I really enjoyed reading the documentation and following the thought process behind the project. Thank you!
• Really nice documentation and research. There are components here but it would be wonderful to see them combined further. Whilst the paintovers of other effects are helpful and good for communicating and idea, I would encourage the artist to concept their ideas. This could be photobashing, simple drawings and diagrams.
• This piece starts out really well but unfortunately loses energy towards the end. The transition and bubble effect is really nice and has some great motion and timing in it. It has a really satisfying pop at the start and transitions gracefully with a good use of tonal variation. The rest of the elements that follow feel detatched, not matching the style, area of the initial effect or colour theme. Without something to represent the different characters its hard to understand what is happening. Even in the documentation its a little confusing to understand how all of the elements make sense in one effect. Readability and understanding is essential in gameplay FX as the FX are used to convey complex information about the game mechanics. In this instance I feel they confuse more than help create understanding of what is happening.
• Great understanding of technical workflow and amazing organisation throughout the project. The final presentation could be cleaner and the effect feels very disconnected, almost as if it is 3 separate effects. Some work on timing and composition could help fix this. Great work overall :)