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?

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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