Hi my name is BJ and I am the main VFX artist for Beta Breaker. When it comes to making visual effects, my philosophy was the following

1.  To make something stylized but not too cartoony for the game. As to fit with how the texturing and models are styled. 
2. It was simple enough to iterate on through scripting so that changes can
3. Looks cool in a way that would impress me if I was just looking at the game

For example, the explosion I created for the game here. I wanted something simple to be used as a death effect for the enemies. So I chose to make this small explosion that can also be used for other events in the game, such as damaging a car too much. Which I think fits our game's style as well as being simple to edit to be bigger if needed.  As well as being interesting to me, especially the aspect of the car. Another effect I created was this loot drop effect for the modifiers, which is to denote the rarity. As you can see, the rarer the item, the more appealing which is to show the players visually what the better drop is.