Shuriken Fireworks

Just a simple scene to test some of the possibilities of the Shuriken particle system without resorting to scripting. It's based on the one of the example scenes included with Unity 3.5

I started on this a long time ago, but I recently got back into Unity so I've been trying to finish some of the projects I had which were not highly unrealistic. So I polished this some and called it done. But I did spend hours tweaking the particles without really getting anywhere. I'm not really a fan of Shuriken in that regard. It's really hard to tell how changing a curve will actually influence the look of your particle system because the interface feels so disconnected. It's also very clumsy to work with compared to for instance a node based interface.

I also spent a long time trying to mimic a shaky camera being held by a person watching the fireworks through animations, hence the look of the scene itself, but when I began this project I messed up the scene scale so moving the camera just slightly would reveal how close the camera actually was to the fireworks and it made it look like a miniature. So in the end I just deleted the animations. I was also fiddling with some DirectX 11 bokeh effects to simulate camera focus, but I scrapped that as well. I'm proud of myself for managing to avoid feature creep for once as it's very much visible in all my old projects.

The sound effects are from freesound.org and all credit go to their respective creators. The links are listed below:
https://freesound.org/people/unfa/sounds/209310
https://freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/65731
https://freesound.org/people/Heigh-hoo/sounds/21410

About Øyvind Strømsvik (TwiiK)

I've been passionate about games all my life and started dabbling in game development about 15 years ago with BlitzBasic,... read more but I quickly lost interest and began doing 3d modeling instead. 3d modeling remained a hobby and I picked up game development again around the release of Unity 2.0. My driving force behind wanting to get back into game development was my lost interest in commercial games as they started appealing to a group of gamers I was no longer in. Indie games were the only games that still looked interesting, but at the same time some of them looked like they would be just as fun to make as to actually play. And many of them were made by just one guy.