Game1, Day 33 – Dynamite, now with epic explosions!

I’m a big fan of flashy glow effects in games. I had a reputation where I used to work for going over the top with flashy effects. They’re kind of mind-numbing to make when you’re animating a little speck of flame flicking out and disappearing but the end result is usually awesome looking and worth all the trouble. For the dynamite I needed an explosion and decided to go with a smoke cloud and an old school “circle explosion” flash…lots of old video games and cartoons used this and I’ve always dug it… also drawing a circle is easy, haha YouTube compresses stuff kind of ugly, so here’s a frame from the explosion in good quality:

And here’s a video of the explosion in motion:

I used a particle generator in 3d to make the cloud poofs, with a cell-shaded texture so they’d keep the style of the rest of the game with only 3 levels of shading. Then in Photoshop I made an Action to select the light and middle shades in the cloud and copy them, Guassian Blur them, and set their blending mode to Screen so the clouds have a slight glow to them. The circle flash was just done by hand afterward and has a bunch of glows applied to it as well.

I dig the end result and in the actual game I’d like to have the screen shake vertically slightly when the explosion happens. Also I just realized I need to add a spark and possibly a smoke trail to that dynamite haha

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