Hello this is a little Unity tutorial about how to achieve pixel art styled particles in your game so you can add a better UX (user experience) and a more attractive and notorious look to certain events/interactions in your games and keep that amazing retro style!



We use this technique in the development of our game “Warcher Defenders”

Here is an example of something you can make with particles in Unity:

So let’s begin, these are the archives you will need to make the particles:

A sprite sheet for your desired effect, in this case the sparks for the Wizard full combo attacks:

I recommend you to create the sprite sheet for the effect in a single row and every sprite to be contained in a square space so you can edit it much easier in the particle system component (we will see that part in a moment):

With this configuration for the image (we are using a Pixel Per Unit of 16 for all of our sprites, put there the one that you use for your project):

We have ready the sprite sheet for the particle, now we need a Material to contain this sprite:

Make a folder called “Material” if you don’t have one (an organized project rules!) And then inside it right click ->Create -> Material

Now we have a material, but we need to set some configurations so it can support our sprite correctly. Select the material you created and go to it Shader then select Unlit -> Transparent

Now we need to add a name to the new material then drag and drop the sprite we configured to it so we can have something like this:

It’s time for create our particle system! Go to your game hierarchy right click -> Particle System and just drag and drop your material at the end of the particle system stuff, between the “Add Component” button and the “Particle System Curves”, and we will have something like this:

To solve this, we need to enable the Texture Sheet Animation and change some values:

This is where the particle system will “read” the sheet in the material we created:

Tiles: here you will need to add the number of sprites/divisions that your sprite sheet have, so it can show correctly the sprites.

Animation: here you will choose if you want to read the Whole Sheet, or just a Single Row, in our example we are using only one row.

Frame Over Time: this option will allows us to select how our particle system will be animated

Constant: You will always see the corresponding sprite to that position.

Curve: the particle will change according to the curve.

Random Between Two Constants: every time a particle is created it will be a random sprite.

Give it a try and play with these options, you can’t break anything here!

So let’s test the next configuration in our particle (set the Start Size to 1 so the particles will always remain of the same size, if you want particles with different sizes adjust the sprites on the sheet that way:

And finally we will have something like this!

This is how it looks in our demo scene:

Things to have in mind

+ Keep the same Pixel Per Unit for all the images on your project.

+ Keep the Start Size always to 1.

+ Turn off all the rotation modifiers on the particle system.

+ Have fun and explore the particle system settings!

I hope these steps help in your retro style project!

I will add a project with three examples of particles, included the one in this tutorial so you can practice and try it! :D

DOWNLOAD DEMO PROJECT

See you on the next Tutorial!

Juanini

What do you think?