In a fighting game, you usually expect a small little explosive visual to indicate where a hit lands. Me and my peers are working on a fighting game. Our game didn't have those small explosive visuals, so I opened up Photoshop and spent 8 hours across two days making animations and bringing them into Unity to the most of my ability.

I didn't really grab any references, I just drew off of ideas in my head. You might frown upon this, but the visual is already abstract, so to reference any existing effect is to reference the method, rather than to think the idea yourself. And at that, I was thinking about Madness: Project Nexus 2, so originality was already diluted.

"Starry"

The first one I did was the starry one; as it explodes, shooting stars come out, not the two that explode into single, perceptively-unified stars. I went straight ahead, starting with frame one, and drawing the animation moving forward. So, the first frame is just a big, unsteady star, each spike pointing in a direction I expect the smaller stars to disperse in. The second frame, the smaller stars are nearly in the place they should end in, instantly. All successive frames are just them moving slightly away from the center and shrinking before vanishing. I also started drawing only white, then manually outlined every frame with my brush's blending mode set to "Behind." (If you never use any other brush or layer blending modes, you can almost treat one layer as two layers by using the behind brush blend mode.)

After about an hour or more, I was finished, and asked a few artists what they thought, and what it looked like to them. The main thing I got from them was that it's "magical," like a wizard beam landing. I didn't have any immediate ideas as to how to do it better, so I just tried something else.

"Cut"

In our fighting game, we have a character that fights with a pair of scissors. I thought maybe I could make an effect specific to that. Again, I took the straight-ahead approach to animating it, with only a notion in my head to guide me. This worked mostly nicely, but the effect wasn't violent and fast enough, resembling a stroke rather than a cut. The fix to this was actually pretty easy; I removed the second frame entirely, so the jump between frame 1 and 2 was more significant, and the general motion was more of what I wanted. However, as I was drawing this, I also thought about the cloth and skin that would separate, and tried to abstract that in jagged waves dispersing from the main element.

"Brute"

After making the cut, I wanted to try again with a generic blunt effect. Same method as the "Starry" effect, except with differently-shaped outward elements and more of them. At the end it seemed I overcompensated. But, I thought there was also something unique, because it felt to communicate this absolute pulverization, so I decided to keep it on the shelf.

"Generic"

I literally just tried again, but to get a more reasonable amount of disperso, and I also chose to make it smaller in case we used "Brute" too, so there was more distinction. I think I accomplished this sufficiently, though a criticism I got was that it's too radially symmetrical, and I don't really know what to say about that till it's in.

"Ashesmack"

<There should be something here, but there isn't>