I had the opportunity to work on A44’s Flintlock for 7 months between 2023 and 2024 by seamlessly joining their team as a co-developer from FX-Chamber. In Unreal 4 I created visual effects with Niagara and its Scratch Pad system, new shaders/materials, and even dabbled with blueprint work for some extra involved systems. I personally love to work with effects that make efficient use of all that Unreal can offer us and solving problems by making the best out of my generalist skill set or working together with other departments (generally that being the gameplay designers and programmers).

This was a fantastic experience where I had the chance to work on plenty hero assets, here are some of the highlights of the work I did during this time:

As I came late into production there were already plenty of placeholder and first pass effects implemented so a lot of my work involved further tweaking and polishing other people’s work; but I did have the fortune of working on some big ones completely or almost from scratch.

0:01 – 0:06 : The fragment’s idle state. Made from scratch.
0:07 – 0:11 : Enki’s fast jump travel. Polished.
0:12 – 0:13 : Purple explosion (pestilence curse, comes from an armour skill) from scratch. Some polish to the gunshots.
0:14 – 0:17 : Refractive dodge (effect from particular armour), polished it. Dodge jump backwards, lots of tweaks and polish. Blue gun shot, tweaks and polish; this one was hard to balance between the light and dark areas of the game.
0:18 – 0:19 : Jumping and dodging; I tweaked and polished these two working together with the game’s art director MC Derne, since these ones are constantly seen through the whole game a lot of time was dedicated to them. Mid-air explosion (armour skill); tweaked and polished.
0:19 – 0:21 : Explosive grenade; tweaked and polished.
0:22 – 0:24 : Electric grenade; made from scratch. This one I really liked, if there are any enemies in the blast range the nade will connect with them with electricity.
0:25 – 0:28 : The fragment’s activation. Made from scratch as well.
0:29 – 0:30 : Close up view of the mountain
0:31 – 0:34 : Defeat of second to last boss cinematic, where the boss goes through a portal. I polished the base material for the portal, added the effect that happens around the boss as it crosses through, and created the particle systems for it as well.
0:35 – 0:45 : Cinematic after defeating the last boss. Someone else did the first pass of all these effects and I tweaked and polished them.

“Tweaking” can mean a wide range of things but generally I mean I added/deleted/edited emitters in an involved way that changes how it looks and/or how it functions. By “polishing” I mean editing what’s already there to make it better optimized and push the visuals a bit farther in quality without drastic visual change.

I personally really like working with this style of effects that are semi-realistic in the sense that they’re grounded while still being fantastical. I’d say that my preferred style ranges from this to more stylized effects that still benefit from procedural textures without depending on hand drawn flip-books.