Game Journal #179 - Effects!!!!! (Patreon)

Now that I'm over the massive work mountain of actually coloring all these attack animations I decided to take some time and sort out the visual language of how their effects should work.  There's a bunch to share today so I hope you enjoy the little journey.  I'll take it from the top:

This was my earliest and latest takes on the attack arcs and effects, kicking up a little dust cloud and printing an arc with some kind of movement for the first melee attack and printing a one-frame shape for the last ranged attack.  The melee effect was expanded outward into a kind of implementation where the swing arc had more frames in less time than the attack itself, and in-engine I had a hard time getting it to really look right, and the ranged effect looked too cheap as just one little shape, so my objective for a new pass on attack effects was to make them all two-frames, let each frame linger a bit more and make the frames more interesting than "the same shape as the original arc swing" for melee and "something less turnip-shaped" for ranged effects.

First up, here's Alice's muzzle flashes.  She shoots strong projectiles so I thought to make her muzzle flashes nice and big, and I gave them a kind of squared-off look to help the expanding fireball have a bit of character.  A quick note about these sprites: we have a system in place that shades these effects according to the timing of your inputs, so they're all white to allow them to be recolored easier.  The reason they all have pink as their shaded color is a bit of color theory on my part: I was thinking how I could get darker values looking nice with this shader applied and my thought was that, when I pull my darks I'm always skewing them towards red, wherever they are on the color bar.  So naturally, if I make the grey part of the white a tinge red, then when it's shaded with the color shader that value will be pulled towards red just as if I was picking the darker color myself.  I think I test-ran this in engine and I think it looked good, but we'll see when we get there.

One of the important details I wanted to include for ranged attacks is a way to visually count which shot it is, since one shot or another looks about the same, they don't really get that much bigger.  I do make the muzzle flash bigger, but it's subtle.  The real trick here is the dark part inside the muzzle flash- to indicate the shot number, this bit breaks up in the second frame into a number of parts equal to which shot is being fired.  It both captures the aesthetic of a gunshot gas cloud and also gives you a visible 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 as the shots progress.  I might adjust the arm bits on flash #6 to make it a bit more distinct from #5 but we'll see if that ends up being necessary or not.

Lizzie's swings had some cool smear frames in them that kinda got eaten up by the lingering big shape of color from the original iteration of effects, so my goal here was to find a stylish way to break up the arc and help keep the original arc somewhat visible when the effect is out.  The way this ended up working was I took the shapes effect from her first attack swing and applied it to everything else, it ended up working out nice because it a) gives a feeling of slow, heavy bludgeon damage with how the wrecktangles break up in their second frame, b) help give a sense of depth to her swings and c) imply a direction of momentum between frames one and two of each effect.  I'm excited to see how this one looks in-engine.

A cool side-effect of doing this broken-up shapes method is it gave me a way to approach Lizzie's attack 4, which is a dashing Stinger-style approach attack.  I wasn't sure how to add an effect to this since it is able to attack on diagonals, but I got something to apply to it with this style.  I ended up making an offset diamond-shape of little pommel thrust shapes around Lizzie's mop strike, and my plan is to put spawn triggers for this effect on a few points along this attack's animation timeline, so if it goes straight forward it looks cool and if it goes diagonal it shouldn't register the kinds of flat lines my original effect attempt on this move registered.  Overall this new effect set feels more bone-breaking than the last.

Monday's gunshots are smaller and more rounded than Alice's since they don't hit as hard but there's more of them.  Communicating the degree of damage in each attack has always been a priority for these animations and effects, which is why the melee swings tend to get larger with each swing.  The same as Alice, Monday's shots each have the gas-breakup effect inside the muzzle flash indicating which shot is what number, only Monday's go up to eight instead of stopping at six.

The big challenge for Monday is his attack 4 and 5 shots, where each shot produces two fireballs.  For demo purposes I just left them on successive frames in the art file, but in-game I'm going to have to dial in the timing where they flash a bit quicker so they don't linger around quite so much.  I had to kinda fudge the breakup frame on shot #5 to make sure all the segments are visible around Monday's other arm, but that one will probably be a secret for the screen pausers.  

I only got up to Lou's first attack set this week before I had to switch back to comics, but I think the idea I have is workable for him.  Compared to Lizzie, whose attacks are big and slow, Lou's are very fast and numerous, so a different approach was important for him.  I tried adapting the original arc method, since I developed it on his animations and thought they fit him pretty well, except instead of having a four-frame swoosh effect the arc decays and breaks up in its second frame.  I always want to give Lou's two weapons their own distinct texture so I made the plunger break up into round shapes and the wrench breaks up into square shapes, to give a sort of sense of what being hit by either of them might feel like.

Lou's second animation set is a big challenge because his attacks 4 and 5 are spins that incorporate a -lot- of assets.  I think in the first pass his effects had something like 50 frames, which I intend to cut down tremendously, but it's gonna take a little doing and I'm probably going to continue using the original arcs as a basis and apply the decay to them, but boy is there a lot of fishing line to untangle with this one!  

So that's where I stand right now on these effects.  After I wrap up Lou's I'm gonna pop them all into the engine and see how they look in-game.  After this I'll probably work on some air attacks and then take another pass at background colorizing, and at that point this should be looking like a real actual game.  Thanks for sticking with me on this journey!  I'll be back with more as soon as I can.