One of the things i was happy to have been able to do for Toxologic was the rain effects during the final Minotaur sequence. Here is a video of it. Be sure to view full screen in HD for every last drip!

The system is actually composed of 3 parts: A rain cone that surrounds the player, the drops on the ground, and a few rain sheets for where the player enters and exits the rain. There were several reasons i took this approach, the biggest one being efficiency. Since the rain had to cover the entire level, individual particles were impossible. Instead, i created a simple cone which i parented to the camera, and added a transparent shader to it. I also used invisible planes attached to a mesh particle emitter to spawn particles along the ground for raindrop splashes. 

All in all, i really like this little hack, and think it adds a lot to the dramatic tension of the final encounter :D

We used a small particle effect in Toxologic to guide the player towards open doors. Since the doors would only open for a brief period, players had to know to chase the effect in order to get through the door. This is the final effect we created.

The path is driven by animation curves the level design team created. I wrote a small script for orbiting the animated game object and attached it to 2 objects along with particle trails. This resulted in some nice, smooth arcs, no matter how sharp of a turn the effect had to take.

Toxologic is a First Person puzzle platformer, revolving around all the amazing things you can do with the most popular character in videogames: Crates. From the beginning, we planned to use effects to emphasize and re-enforce the player's interaction with them. 

The very first mechanic introduced to the player in toxologic is the concept of the force and freeze arrows. Put simply, the force arrows move crates, while the freeze arrows freeze them in place. While the force arrows were fairly simple to understand, many people had problems trying to figure out when the freeze effect would wear off. Taking this into consideration, i designed a shader that would create an overlay texture that would disappear at the same rate as the freeze cooldown. This made it much simpler to see when the effect would wear off, and allowed us much more flexibility when designing puzzles.

Next, we had the squash and stretch arrows. In a similar fashion to the freeze arrow, we wanted to provide visual feedback that was linked to the arrow that hit the crate. For these, I created  similar shaders to the freeze shader that would overlay a wipe vertically or horizontally over the geometry, to signify *magical* squashing and stretching. In order to make sure the overlay did not distort horribly while the geometry stretched and squashed, I used a bit of shader math to create the overlays. This way, no matter how the geometry was modified, the overlays would remain consistent throughout the transition.

Finally, I added effects for the AI. In our game the Minotaur's main attack in Toxologic was throwing crates. As we were play-testing we didn't feel the crates were threatening enough. We decided the best way to solve this was to make the crates explode of course...

I took the original high poly crate mesh and split it into about 40 pieces. We attached rigid bodies to the pieces and set the prefab to swap with the crate mesh upon a strong enough impact. The pieces also maintain the momentum of the crate at the time of impact to complete the dynamic explosion effect.

All in all, i'm pretty happy with how the crates turned out. Crates usually don't have this many features, and so it presented a unique challenge when designing effects. Hopefully the visual feedback provided by the effects helps players to better understand our mechanics and lets them solve puzzles easier!