Game Skin Example
If you're not familiar with these PC rhythm games, the premise is pretty simple. You see a note coming down the screen and hit a corresponding key on your keyboard. The notes will fit rhythms in the song that plays. In this case there are 4 keys to hit. These games can have user created skins which need assets that change how notes, the gameplay stage, and hit effects look.
For the particle effect that appears when a note is hit, I used After Effects with Trapcode plugins to create it and rendered it out to a spritesheet. A spritesheet looks like the images below, and they get divided while displayed in the game to appear as an animation.
I made two types, on the first image it's for regular notes you have to tap a key, and on the second image it's for notes where you need to hold the key down.
More Assets seen in the video. The gray "laser" asset gets coloured by the game so the texture is in grayscale.
In the video example, there are judgements on the screen (the "FLAWLESS" text), and the text corresponds to how well you hit a note. In the video, the asset is a static texture which is then animated by tweens in the game.
I work with multiple game engines, and sometimes it needs to be manually animated. I've done this in After Effects with a spritesheet just like the previous hit particles.
