"Styg's Ascent is a rogue-like, 2D action-platformer where you play as Styg, a demon overlord determined to reclaim his fortress that has been sieged by pesky heroes. Clear out the invading forces from every single crevice on your way to take back your throne. Grow more powerful as your health dwindles, unleashing your inner strength. Ascend back to your former glory; no checkpoints, no heals and one life."
Styg's Ascent was the first actual major Uni project that I worked on. We wanted to create a game where you felt like a boss a player would usually encounter when playing a video game. You were supposed to feel powerful and unstoppable. And of course important ingredients to that were VFX and Music!
VFX
Tech used: Unity Shader Graph, Shuriken, Clip Studio Paint
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The main goals VFX-wise for this project were to enhance the player's feeling of power, making their actions have the impact, visually, that they do mechanically.
It was also important to communicate the different items and their effects to the player. Each item got their own VFX (where applicable, more on that later)
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A decent amount of effects in this game were made with frame-by-frame animation. This was our first animation heavy project and we were limited to 2D at the time. Regardless we decided to go for frame-by-frame animation for the rest of the game and it felt right do do the same for the VFX instead of going for a more procedural approach.
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The animations you see on the right were all made in Clip Studio Paint.
The player's effects needed to be big, snappy and have an impact. I worked a lot with rather pointy shapes and made the animations have a decently long wind-up and then a quick resolution (like the explosive scream) to really give that feeling of impact.
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The enemies in our game were essentially angles. The "good guys" that took over your dungeon. So their effects were supposed to look graceful and "holy", but also still threatening and destructive in some way. So a theme for these enemies ended up being these halos that became a tell for the player when they were about to attack.
PUNCH ATTACK
PLAYER SCREAM
HOLY BEAM (ENEMY ATTACK)
ITEM EFFECTS
The items were one of the central mechanics in Styg's Ascent as well, seeing as it is a rogue-like.
Thus communicating the items effects clearly through their icons (which I also had the pleasure of designing) and their VFX was key.
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For the item icons I went for a very simple silhouette style that should very clearly communicate to the player what they just picked up. A lot of the items modify mechanics that the player already has, therefore a lot of the icons feature objects that the player should already be familar with after they complete the tutorial and/or just look at their character.
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The VFX for the items were supposed to be rather simple, but still stand out to the player so they can notice that they just got a new thing to play with and ideally also what the effect of it is.
PLAYER FEEDBACK
There were also a few mechanics that we decided to communicate through VFX. Those being the dash and the punch cooldowns.
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The dash, being a very important tool for the platforming challenges in the game, had to have it's cooldown communicated to the player in some way.
We ended up settleing on using Styg's scarf for that purpose. The scarf (which uses a similar script and technique as the fishes in Mantallion for it's movement) becomes thinner and greyed out once the player dashes and then slowly returns back to it's original state over the course of the cooldown. A little spark and a sound then indicate that the player may use the dash again.
Getting the scarf to move in a natural way here was a big challenge as adding gravity to the "tail" script proved to be a little more challenging than initially expected. But I think it came out great for my knowledge at the time.
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Now for the punch and the abomination of a shader you can see to the right:
Styg has a punch ability that gets stronger the lower his health is. It becomes a very powerful ability and therefore has a decently long cooldown.
This cooldown is shown through the runes on his body lighting up when it's available.
This would have been a very easy thing to do if we had planned for it from the start.
When we had the idea for the punch the animations for Styg were already done and we were fast approaching our deadlines. So I had to figure something out. I created a shader that takes Styg's sprite(s) and replaces the color of his runes with whatever color you want. Problem was that his eyes were the same color, but they should stay green the whole time. So I basically had to split the spirte above the neck and only do the color replacement below that point.
MUSIC
The music for this project was a blast to make.
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From the beginning our product owner wanted something heavy and dark. Something that once again expresses Styg's power level and his status as a boss.
And who else could I turn to in that moment for inspiration other than the amazing Mick Gordon and his Doom soundtrack.
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The main attraction in this style of music is obviously the heavily distorted electric guitar.
For this sound I used a rather simple sine-based synth together with Native Instrument's Guitar Rig for the amp effects.
This guitar plays pretty much throughout the whole track.
GUITAR
Combine this with a hard hitting, fast bassline and some very distored and high pitched synths and I think I quite succeeded in creating something that sounds very intimidating and powerful.​
BASS
SYNTHS
This rather intense track couldn't be playing the whole time tough or the player would get very tired of it very quickly we imagined.
Therefore I had to create another track that was basically supposed to be filler between the more action-packed fights in the room.
This track is very simple, mostly consisting of strings, organs and a choir playing a chord progression over and over.
The most noteworthy part of it however is the "percussion" for which I used the chain sounds of Styg's hook to give the track some rythym.