How do these special effects get done?

Questions
#1

Hi guys, so I am looking at this game:

https://www.bigbutton.co/galaxy-keeper-space-shooter/

And I see:

  1. Lasers
  2. Lightning Bolts

Normally these 2 are very difficult to achieve without custom drawing logic (you cant easily achieve this with typical sprite assets). How do you achieve such Special Effects in Defold?

Lightning VFX how its was made
#2

I’m no specialist but I think it’s using some combination of the following:

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#3

Galaxy Keeper is afaik made with Defold :grin: @Alex_8BitSkull also made lasers in Void Scrappers and I believe he explained it somewhere, but can’t find it now. It was about stacking “parts” of animated lasers.

I believe lasers are super simple with 9-slice and just proper scaling (I didn’t make lasers, but I made connections between two points for a node/flow graph tests, the way of working is the same as laser then)

Lighting might involve some shader to make it not look stretched too much and realistic, so I would draw it on a sprite like laser, but make a custom fragment shader that draws noised bolts on it :wink:

#4

I kind of was for the idea this was one of the ways you could achieve that. Ouch, that process hurts

And this too… I kind of was doubting it would have been this manual bit seems it is. That stitching process I admit can hurt alot :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

#5

Thanks for the insights.

#6

Yes, what Paweł describes is how I did lasers in Void Scrappers.

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