As the game development progress, I am adding more and more visual effects and animations from different tool sets and it gets messy. For example, when the character gets hurt or casts a skill, the following may occur:
Play Animator Controller Trigger, Transition states from Attack > Hurt > Idle
Play Audio
Play Particle System
Play Visual Effect Graph
Change Material properties (e.g. Material.SetFloat(“_FlashRed”, 1.0f)
Move Camera
Adjust event signals
Since the timing of these effects are strongly related to each other, tweaking 0.1s in one means I have to change almost all of them and the workflow is very time consuming.
I am a new solo dev, so I am wondering if there is a better workflow out there how to deal with this, or is this what everyone else does?
You can use timeline since it has scrubbing playback in the editor for most of that, and whatever it doesn’t have can be done with custom tracks. That said, I usually think of timeline as overkill and just create a simple scene to test one-off effects like that in isolation.
Thanks, glad to know that. I am using Timeline in some effects and I also have a test “Effects” scene where I build the effects there too, but switching back and forth still feels painful.
Some of the annoying things are like having to manually drag and drop bindings that are supposed to be set at runtime, windows keep switching context when you click a different game object, so you have to lock it, but then later you forget to unlock it and you change something else, going back to the real scene and test it in playmode – its slow on my computer, etc. etc.
I’ll settle if that’s the best workflow it can be.
Yeah, I hear you about that binding issue. I have to deal with the same thing because of the amount of cross-scene references between my player scene and the actual level scene where cutscenes and gameplay events live. Unfortunately this is the best workflow I’ve found so far, maybe someone else can chime in with suggestions that go further.