There's a sequence in the Night Market that gradually builds the longer the players are on the right side of the fightline. There are 3 phases, the Vat builds up pressure until it blows in the third

The metal deformation was made with a RBD sim of the sides, there's a cool node in Houdini that will keep verts welded together as long as the constraints are still connected. This was brought in as a VAT and added to a sequence.

Worms and Bugs! This system is surprisingly complex and probably over engineered but I think it is fun

Player position is sent into a Niagara System running a 2D grid of the floor. The positions are written to a render target and fed to the system spawning the bugs. Height and angle are set with a top down snapshot of the normals and height of the level.

The worms are stationary VAT particles, pretty unsettling to look at which is perfect

The grubs are moving particles with WPO based on speed. They attempt to avoid the player but can also be squished if not fast enough. They will also return to their starting zone

The worms have two states, hiding and flailing. The states are made to blend between each other, when a player is near they will hide underground and re-emerge when the player is gone

I needed some solution to hide and un-hide the worms, I added in some ground pieces to the VAT that deform when the worm emerges, and reverse it to hide them

What the ground chunks look like for the particles. Their color are based on a world projected texture matching the floor

My inspiration for it all, one day when taking my dog out at night I could _hear_ the worms moving all around me, when I tried to film them all they would retract into hiding, I was very excited to have a reason to use something like this in the game