Mezzanine Stairs

Snow Effect

The snow effect previously mocked up in the City of Atalon preview is now implemented in-game. Unlike the rain effect, snowflakes are depth-sorted into the scene, and can fall between and behind characters and map layers.

Flakes land randomly based on the map terrain. To test coverage, I shortened the falling animation to a single frame which produced an enjoyable laser light show:

Smoke Effect

We are adding blur to the smoke in World’s End. A recent fix to a sprite scaling issue made it trivial to make smoke appear blurry by decreasing texture resolution. Considering how much smoking Tevoran and Company do during cutscenes, we decided the effort was worthwhile.