There were only a few weeks that I worked with Highwire Games. A large focus was on realism and physicality. This led to using two different renders for each smoke particle. The first renderer was for volumetric rendering. Allowing better looking shadows and depth since the player could walk into them. Whereas the other renderer was a typical sprite with a looping smoke flipbook. This gave the smoke lighting details that the volumetric wasn’t capable of making on its own.
Another aspect of this project was procedural levels. To help achieve this direction, almost all environment particle systems had parameters for adjusting the spawning shape and size. Which was hooked up in their procedural system. As an example, our systems know how long a ledge is. So it would spawn an amount of particles in relation to the length of the ledge.