This was in large part because we wanted the player to be exploring, engaging their mind in the navigation process and not following some sort of game UI without thinking. Our approach was not to try and build a pathing system to constantly change directions to avoid obstacles, but to aim directly at the objective and leave the pathfinding to players. We didn’t originally intend for our global wind system to become a navigation mode until the Art Director for Ghost, Jason Connell, came to one of our lead engineers, Adrian Bentley, and me to ask if we could make the particles be the direction indicator for quests. We also sample the speed of the wind to add additional turbulence as the wind speed increases. This is true for fires, sparks, smoke – pretty much everything. ![]() We integrated this global wind direction into nearly every single effect in the game when a bomb goes off or a campfire is lit, the smoke drifts in the correct wind direction. All of these elements were tuned together so that they all moved appropriately under different wind conditions. Aside from the particles, there are trees, grass, cloth, and ropes that all move with the wind. This was an obvious area where particles could help by adding floating leaves and pollen in the air, but there are many systems that are all working in concert to provide the illusion of the wind actually blowing. One of the key art direction goals from the very beginning was that everything needed to move. Lastly, we hand-placed a small amount of elements to help guide the player during their exploration of the island of Tsushima. We also had to support large vistas across a dynamic weather and 24 hour moving clock. This meant we needed to update our content through automated processes as much as possible. The world of Ghost of Tsushima is significantly larger than Second Son but the Visual Effects team at Sucker Punch was only two people for most of the development. The second major goal was that we had to build at a large scale. These are just some of the examples of the kind of data I’m talking about: global wind, player-created wind from movement, character displacement, terrain, and water position info, weather info like wetness, time of day, and much more. There are a lot of ways we made particles more interactive, but it all required more data from the game world. We also wanted to add animal life, provide epic vistas with environmental ambience and really nail the “mud, blood, & steel” direction by dynamically muddying and bloodying characters as they fight and move across the environment. We knew from the very beginning that wind was an important element we had to incorporate across particle systems and beyond. For Ghost of Tsushima, one of my main goals was to take that system and pivot it towards high levels of interactivity. We had a huge investment in expression-driven particle systems from Second Son, where we created a wide array of magical superpowers. ![]() The first was that I wanted to push the levels of interactivity in our particle systems. When we started Ghost I identified a couple of major areas of improvement, based on what the project needed. Today I’ll be covering how we made the transition from flashy superpowers to a grounded but beautiful game filled with mud, blood and steel – as well as the methods we used to create the visual effects in Ghost of Tsushima. I like to describe my job as solving art and design problems with technology, something I’ve been doing at Sucker Punch since Infamous 2. I’m Matt Vainio, lead visual effects artist at Sucker Punch. It’s also considerably different from our last game, Infamous: Second Son, which was full of superpowered visual effects. The island of Tsushima is a beautiful place to explore, made of many tiny details lovingly crafted by our team.
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