Killing my design

One of the last things I had to complete before moving on with anything is how the character died. I discussed with the designer about what he thought was best for the situation since at this time I was running behind. So after much discussion we decided that he would explode/combust once he died. 

With this in mind I began looking up ideas of how I could create this effect in Photoshop. At first I downloaded a scattering effect brush for Photoshop, thinking that this would be the best way to create the effect. Since I had to load the brush in Photoshop, I went to the brushes and clicked the arrow, then loaded the brushes. However after I did this I realised at how this wasn’t going to work with my idea. The scattering effect wasn’t right and scattered in an unusual way leaving behind a box from the brush itself. 

Instead I decided to create my own brush so that I could have full control over it and to do this I had load the brush panel. Depending on your Photoshop the brush panel is normally loaded and on the right side with the layers. If not then you will have to load it and you can do this by selecting the brush tool and clicking on the icon to the right of the airbrush icon. To get the effect that I achieved I had to change the attributions of the brush itself. So since I wanted to create the effect that when he died that he exploded, I enabled the scattering effect. This gave me the option to scatter the brush and create a brush that had looked like it had been scattered.

Once I had the ideal brush I had to begin on creating the effect itself. I initially had done the design in black, later realising that I would have to change this to white. Creating a new layer I started off with a single frame that had an image of the scattering. I then create on different layers and long wavy line. This gave the effect that once he died, he scattered into different directions. 

Since I was creating different paths, I decided to make a group folder so that my layers were more organised. So I clicked on the folder icon in the layer panel and dragged specific layers into the corresponding folders. The next step was to actually animate it, so opening the animation panel I began to see how many frames I would need. The process in creating a smooth animation was simple and I had to make sure that the layers than need to be seen at the time would have been. 

 

Once I messed about with the animation and correcting the right time that each frame needed to be seen I now realised that since the game itself was a dark game, the colour would need to be lighter. In doing this I selected each group and clicked on the image options in the upper left. Once this was done I clicked on adjustments and hit the saturation options, this then gave me the options to change the colour to white. Upon doing so I realised at this time that I couldn’t see the animations so on a previous layer, I added a black background just so I could see the animation.

Once this was done all I needed to do was make sure that the animation was on a transparent background. Since I created the drawing on different layers, this was easy enough since I just removed the black ground and saved it for Web & Devices. 

As you can see below this was the outcome and the effect was something that I was going for. I was planning to add more effects but given the time frame and adding final details to the game, I was limited in doing so. Finally when we tested this in game I actually didn’t have to change anything about the animation since everything looked good.