I'm usually pretty coy about this gamedev stuff, like to talk up how cruddy my code is, make jokes about how much of a *(&#$show this project is.

But last night I got distracted by particle work and hot d@mn did I handle s$*t. Could be that I'm starved for any form of change to make the fish game tolerable to work on, but I'm really digging these new particles.

Unless you've done heavy particle work, integrating prefabs to child under various root bones, and inherit velocity for hours on end trying to find issues, you're not going to know how much of a brain (*&CK effects work can be, and just mind meltingly annoying trying to manage so many settings that can easily destroy your particles. You spend more time wrangling rotation values between Euler angles and Quaternions than you do making any darned  art. 

I rarely talk about my work history, or areas of expertise in gamedev, but I cut my teeth in this industry doing effects work, and IMO it is one of the best toolsets to learn if you want to eventually be good at making games. EVERYTHING can go wrong, but it has limitless possiblities for coming up with new visual bells and whistles and simultaniously challenges you with the most grueling technical problems and the most open ended bag of "any thing is possible". It's all rooted in positions, rotations, lifetimes, timings, colors, etc, it encompasses every aspect of video games in one tunable package. 

Manage to wrangle the overly complex systems of particle effects with quirky in engine tools, untold edge cases and you can do damned near anything.

First pass on all of this went really well. I'm actually pretty stoked. Just waiting for something to go horribly wrong, things have been going so well as of late on the project.

12 hour day, BABY HOURS!