Our rolling drinking sommelier robot in Sommelier for a while were robots just sliding around a barn. This work for our game play and functionality but was lacking the is visual and polish department.
Unity particle system where I parented an empty game object so that I could set the particle effect to emit as the player a direction to the movement thumb stick. This was designed to be short trail and I set up this effect so that it ran or 2 seconds and that the particles shrink over the life time.
Due to the fact of our characters have one large wheel i made the particles start their life a larger size the normal, this gave the look that the dust was coming from the hole wheel. There was a gravity add to this trail so that it felt it had a weight to it and not a solid straight line from the wheel.
The top image is only a default texture and a colour that pair with our ground texture.
This image above has a changed shader that has as tinted secondary colour this is so that the effect would smooth in to the surrounding environment. With the original texture you notice the difference between the effect and the ground or surrounding object.
The tweaking and little changes that can be made to this effect within the inspector are simple and after you are able to understand and combine these different tweaks the result can make you game or elements in you game feel a lot more coherent and believable.
