GameReclaim

A couple of developers asked me about how I made the explosions in Death vs. Monstars. I decided to share the original flash source of the bigger of the two explosions used. Death vs. Monstars explosion download. When you open the file you can see that it is a rather simple timeline animation that uses gradient fills and shape tweening. This however cannot be used in a game in this form as it consits of too many shapes, so I converted the whole thing into a sprite sheet, and used it as a bitmap. That’s about it. However, if you’d like to know what really makes it look good…read on.
When making explosion animations you face a very big challenge. An explosion is like liquid with very complex movement that you should understand. Have a reference video that you can examine such as this one. It has a great slow motion about a big, fat explosion with smoke, just what we need. Try to reproduce the phases of the explosion in your animation. These are:

1.: Ignition: A bright flash. You can simply put a big white spot on the first frame of your animation.

2.: Fireball: The fuel of the explosion is burning in an expanding sphere-shaped form. The ignition phase gives you the overall size of your animation, the fireball phase grows just a little.

3.: Collapse: The hardest to animate. The fuel of explosion is depleting and without energy the fireball collapses into itself. It’s split up into multiple smaller puffs of fuel which are still burning. At the end of this phase our explosion looks more like a flame than a fireball.

4.: Burnout: Fire gradually turns into smoke (black or grey) as all the fuel burns away. You can give “body” to your smoke by applying some shades on it like it has mass.

5.: Fade: You have to get rid of the sprite in the game so the smoke just dissolves.

Good luck! And please comment