Better Effects!

One thing that's been needing attention for a while is environmental effects aka particle effects. These really help make a believeable world. Looking at Silent Hill, the only effect used is snow, there is a debate on a few fourms as to wheter or not it's ash. But most conclude it is actually snow.
Well there are more effects obviously; such as rain, but snow its the be all and end all as far cinching the aesthetic for Silent Hill goes.

Up umtil now I've just be used a defualt particle effect (pretty much a circle with a faded edge). This works ok, but because the particle system follows the player, many times particles pass directly in front of the view. When this happens, its easy to notice how bland they look.
So, I decided to improve this effect. I found a image of a few snowflakes online, which I previously used when I first began the project:

Obviously it doesnt have a grey background, I added this to make it visible on here!
At any rate, when using this in a particle system it spawns this whole image for every particle emission, so they quite clearly look like whole sheets falling (this would actually be fine for out of inaccessible areas).
So instead after a bit of tweaking, I took this image and made my own 128x128 sprite sheet:

I just randomly cut 25 flakes from the first image and placed them in a grid with a transparent background.
Then in Unity, I told the particle system to use each sprite from this sheet randomly, creating a much better effect.

There is now more visible variation between particles! I could add more by increasing the new sprite sheet size, but I think it looks much better.

In addition to snow, I also looked into other Silent Hill games to see if / what effects they incorperate. It turns out in the more modern entries to the franchise they started using rolling fog. So in addition to the height distance fog I have implemented, I have now also included fog similar to the newer games.

I included a screenshot from in-editor, because the effect is ever so slight that ingame you don't notice it much unless you know it's there!