Okuzeka
Game Development vocabulary · Rendering, Graphics & Performance

Particle system

Meaning in game development, with examples

nounCommon term

In game development, particle system means: A tool that creates effects such as fire, smoke, sparks, rain and magic by producing and moving many small images or shapes called particles.

In Turkish: parçacık sistemi, particle system

How it is used

Built by VFX (visual effects) artists, who set the emission rate, lifetime, size and how color changes over time. Large particle effects cause overdraw and can hurt performance, so they are checked in the profiler.

Example sentences

  1. The explosion uses three particle systems: fire, smoke and flying debris.

  2. Cut the particle count in the rain system; it's killing the frame rate on Switch.

Common collocations

  • particle effect
  • particle count
  • emission rate
  • VFX artist
  • shaderA small program that runs on the graphics card and decides how surfaces look, for example their color, lighting, shine and transparency, or effects like water and fire.
  • optimizationWork that makes a game run faster and use less memory, battery or bandwidth, for example by simplifying models, reducing draw calls or rewriting slow code.
  • post-processingVisual effects applied to the whole image after the scene has been rendered, such as bloom, motion blur, color grading and depth of field.
  • spriteA 2D image used as an object in a game, such as a character, an enemy, a coin or an explosion. Several sprites shown one after another create an animation.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Rendering, Graphics & Performance

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: