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Sequence
Here is the whole sequence from start to finish.
I didn’t put too much effort into the actual graphics as I wanted to focus on the animations, shaders and particles, so most of the assets are just random images found online that I’ve modified to fit the style better.
What isn’t super clear in the gif is that there are three tiers of gems (two of which are visible in this case) with varying rarity, which also affects the particles as they slam into the ground. As you can see, the blue gem has a much more forceful impact effect.
If I had to pick something I could do over, it would be remedying the complete lack of DOTweens. That was an intentional decision on my part as I wanted to focus on shaders and manual animations and DOTweens were explicitly mentioned in the instructions as a nice-to-have, but as it turned out, it was still expected that one should make use of them. Oh well.
I also realized a bit too late that space is not the best choice when it comes to making a juicy presentation as it is quite bland by default…
But what I think turned out especially well is the transition effect at the end, which I spent a relatively large amount of time on, as well as the animations and impacts of the gems. It had been years since I last touched the animation tool in Unity before working on this, so I expected to do a lot worse, but I’m quite pleased with it!
Transition Shader
Here’s me triggering the reload transition a couple of times in a row.
When the user presses the tiny Reload-button in the corner, a grabpass is taken, after which everything inside the scene is reset to its initial state. Using a meteor-texture and some simple math, I check whether each pixel should count as inside a meteor-stripe or not. If so, I apply some random color multiplied by a gradient in the meteor texture. If not, I simply render the grabpass taken before everything reset. And, voìla!
Unfortunately the grabpass does not include the previous meteor-effect, if present, which would’ve been fun - but I can’t remember if that was a technical limitation or not.