The rendering on this is quite impressive! Are they particle systems?
Thank you! And sorry, I somehow missed your reply here. If all goes well the energy attack system will be giant balls of particles, but the aura-like effect that I think you're talking about probably doesn't fall under the category of a particle system?
It's made using verlet physics for the background. You can think of it like either a giant grid where each point is connected to its neighbor to the top and to the right in a ragdoll system, or like a modified cloth simulation where I'm drawing quads between the points on the cloth. Individual points are attracted to nearby players depending on their speed. The quads are drawn with a slight transparency such that it creates an aura-like effect when overlapping with each other.
The terrain operates on this grid as well, where each point can either be air or terrain. Terrain points next to each other are automatically connected, forming impassable lines. Terrain points can jump from their current grid-point to a neighboring grid point if they're pushed far enough towards the new points direction.
The player graphics are using verlet physics too, they're just stick-figures reacting to forces applied depending on the players actual velocity.
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Right now I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do for some of the required Steam marketing images. There's a gallery below of possible header images to use for steam (it's that small image which appears to the right of the videos / screenshots). I guess my question is do any of these work or could they work with some tweaking, or should I do something else for this? I should add that if i decide to use one of those images i'd actually go through the effort of centering or aligning the text better
https://imgur.com/a/n6orpYa