vfx

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vfx

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Real-time 2D VFX cookbook — layered explosions, hit sparks, muzzle flashes, trails, smoke, pickups, heals, shockwaves, weather — with particle parameter recipes, color/readability rules, and mobile-browser performance budgets, from Diablo's VFX talk, Riot's style guide, saint11, and the GDC VFX bootcamps. Use when: 'add effects', 'make the explosion better', 'hits need more impact' (visual side), 'add a trail/aura/sparkle', 'the effects look muddy/noisy', 'particles tank the framerate', or any Phaser particle emitter / blend mode / post-FX work.

Real-time VFX

Effects spell out the mechanics first: before pretty, decide what the player must learn (hit confirmed? danger radius?). Then the timing model: anticipation → overload → processing — brief windup, violent fast core, slow lingering decay. Fast in, slow out: peak size in the first ~20% of an effect's life, the rest is decay.

Two more laws: scale of importance — a basic attack must never outshine an ultimate — and if it feels long, it's way too long: effects live in a busy scene, default shorter than feels right alone.

Anatomy of an explosion (layered)

Build as independent layers — flash → blast → fire → smoke — each with its own timing. Medium explosion ≈ 600–900ms total:

1. Contrast dip (~1 frame, optional): a dark flicker right before the flash multiplies perceived brightness.
2. White flash (50–80ms): near-white core at almost-max radius immediately. Hit-stop and screen shake land here (see game-feel).
3. Sharp blast (100–200ms): hot angular core — sharp shapes for energy, no noise. Debris and sparks launch at max speed now.
4. Fire fade (~25% of total): shrink and cool white→yellow→orange→red.
5. Smoke + afterglow (~40%): smoke rises and fades slowly — it must outlive the fire ~2×. Leave a scorch mark (permanence — Vlambeer).

Minimum 4 frames for a readable sprite explosion. For barrages, chain small explosions offset in time/position, never one long one.

Recipe book

Base textures: a soft white dot, a 4–6px spark streak, a blurry smoke blob — tint does the rest. Parameter ranges are tuned conventions; adjust to scale. Phaser: create emitters once, fire with explode(n, x, y).

• Hit spark: 6–12 particles, life 150–300ms, speed 150–400 radial (cone away from the surface), scale 1→0, ADD. Plus a 1-frame white flash sprite and the victim's tint flash.
• Explosion: 4 layers — flash sprite (scale 0.5→2 in 60ms, ADD); fire 10–20 particles (life 300–500ms, speed 50–200, scale 0.8→0.1, tint white→orange→dark red, ADD); debris 5–10 chunky sprites (life 600–1000ms, speed 200–500, gravityY 600–900, rotation, NORMAL, leave a few on the ground); smoke 5–8 (life 800–1500ms, drift up 20–60, scale 0.5→1.5, alpha 0.6→0, NORMAL, dark grey).
• Dust puff (land/dash): 4–8 particles, life 300–600ms, speed 30–100 out
  • up, scale 0.4→1, NORMAL, grey. Few coherent particles beat a noisy swarm — don't break the smoke's shape.
• Muzzle flash: star/cross sprite 1–2 frames (~30–60ms, ADD) + 3–5 forward-cone sparks (life 100–200ms, speed 200–400) + a small smoke wisp. Camera kicks 1–2px opposite the shot.
• Trail (projectile/dash): emitter follows the object, frequency 10–20ms, life 200–400ms, speed 0–20 (the object's motion spreads them), scale 0.6→0, tint white→orange→grey, ADD; add NORMAL smoke for heavy rockets. Each puff starts brightest and dims as it falls behind.
• Pickup sparkle: ambient 1 particle per 200–400ms, life 400–700ms, drift up 10–30, ADD, gold — or better, a 2–4 frame cross-glint sliding across the sprite every 1–2s. On collect: explode(12) + scale-pop tween (1→1.3→0) + rising "+1" text.
• Heal/buff: 8–12 soft motes over 600ms, life 700–1000ms, speedY −40 to −100, fade in-then-out, ADD, green/gold (rising = positive, falling/inward = negative — color conventions are free information). Expanding soft ring at the feet anchors it.
• Level-up / big payoff: the full arc — 300ms of particles converging inward (anticipation) → flash + ring + explode(25) (overload) → 800ms rising motes (processing). Pair with hit-stop and a bass sting. The one effect allowed to run long.
• Shockwave ring: ring sprite, scale 0.2→2.5 over 300–400ms, alpha 0.8→0, ADD, Cubic.Out. Reserve for big hits — on every hit it's noise.
• Damage flash: sprite solid white/red 1–2 frames; screen-level = a rect at alpha 0.2–0.35 fading over 150–250ms. One flash per event, never a strobe.
• Rain/snow: emit along a line above the camera (emitZone edge). Rain: life ~1200ms, speedY 400–700, thin streaks, alpha 0.3–0.5, NORMAL. Snow: speedY 30–80, sinusoidal drift, life 4–8s, far fewer particles than instinct says. Keep weather mid-value so gameplay FX still pop over it.

Ambience — does it feel like a place?

Combat FX make actions land; ambience makes the world exist. Audit any static-feeling scene against these, all cheap:

• Air has substance: a handful of drifting motes/leaves/embers at low alpha (0.1–0.25), slow drift, long lives (4–10s), NORMAL blend, mid values — like weather, ambience must never out-contrast gameplay FX.
• Reactive foliage: grass/plants as bottom-anchored sprites with a small rotation sway tween; give each blade a phase offset plus a little randomness so they never sync. On player proximity, rotate away from the player and spring back — walking through a field suddenly reads as touching it. Trivial in Phaser (per-sprite rotation tweens, origin at the base).
• Re-theme with a grade, not a tileset: one tileset × a different tint/fog/vignette/light pass = a new biome for free. Adjust value + saturation, add fog or darkness, then place light sources; vary the grade per zone before authoring new art.

Color & readability

• Hot core, cool edge: map particle life to white→yellow→orange→red→grey. Inverted ramps read as magic — use deliberately.
• Reserve value extremes: build in mid values; near-white/near-black spend only on focal moments (Riot).
• One dominant hue per effect; desaturate the secondary. Two saturated complements = noise. Moderate saturation overall — saturate the focal element, mute the support.
• Color conventions are free: green heal, blue frost/mana, orange-red gunpowder, purple dark magic. Give factions/classes a hue family so attribution is instant (Diablo).
• ADD for energy, NORMAL for matter: fire/sparks/magic additive; smoke/dust/debris/blood alpha. Stacked additive whites out.
• Survive busy backgrounds with value contrast: a bright ADD core backed by a darker alpha rim/smoke reads everywhere; pure additive vanishes over bright tiles.
• Sharp shapes = energy, soft shapes = residue. One focal point per effect; everything else smaller and dimmer.
• Stretch particles along velocity — blurred movement reads as power.

Performance (mobile browsers)

• You are fillrate-bound: cost ≈ pixels × overdraw. Cap particle size before count; many small beat few huge transparent ones.
• Limit additive stacking to ~3–4 layers deep at any pixel; fewer, more opaque smoke particles beat many faint ones.
• Pool everything: emitters created once at scene start, reused via explode()/emitParticleAt(); pooled flash/ring sprites. Never create/destroy emitters per hit.
• One FX atlas, and group ADD vs NORMAL effects on separate layers — both texture swaps and blend-mode changes break batches.
• Filters cost a render-to-texture pass (Phaser 4 internal/external filters): one camera bloom fine, per-sprite filters deadly. Prefer the ring-sprite fake over a displacement shader on low-end; gate post-FX behind a quality flag.
• Kill invisible work: stop off-screen ambient emitters; shorten lifespans before cutting counts — lifetime is overdraw-time.

Related skills: game-feel (hit stop/shake/flash that pair with these), animation (sprite-frame FX timing), pixel-art (generating FX sprites on black for ADD), phaser (particle/filter APIs).