Enemy Spaceship explode

[Andy Tran]

 Just some explosion animation for a spaceship in a game I've been planning. C+C would help.

 

[ndchristie]

it looks fine from here, but if you are going to post and animation, its good to actually past and animation if you want critique, or at least an organized filmstrip

[Andy Tran]

 Your spelling is incorrect. Little hard for me to get what you mean from here. Looks like this sentence has 2 meanings?

[Darien]

He's saying if you want a critique on an animation you should post it as an animation, not the frames by themselves.

[lief]

I do like pixelled explosions like this.  Some guidance for these though, because they will be EXACTLY the same everytime a ship explodes you should avoid really asymmetrical explosions and try to stick with as general as possible (fairly centered and even).  For instance, the explosion you have drawn here, with the two initial blooms, I would try to implement in software via a particle engine, with each small bloom as a seperate explosion generated in a random position on the enemy. 
Maybe some rays beaming out of (or before) the initial blooms and rotating to give the full jap explosion effect?

[Andy Tran]

Ah thanks. So does that mean the two blooms should have the same size and stay on the center of the ship?

[ndchristie]

yes, what i ment was, if you are looking for a critique on an animation, you should post the animation, or at least an organized filmstrip.  this is not organized into useable cells, so.........like i said, the stills look fine

my suggestion to you is that, since this explosions has little or nothing to do with the ship, just make a large number of explosion animations and in the game select one at random from a set of explosions of the same relative size of the ship and just destroy the ship instance as the explosion happens

[lief]

if they are not being rendered on top of the enemy as a seperate sprite, then yes, I believe slightly more centered would be good. Slight variation is good, just keep in the mind the more unique the explosion the quicker it will become noticably repetitive.

here are the options, in order of preference (mine)

1.  Seperate explosions, rendered in a random fashion at run time, allowing variable / random size, speed and position
2.  Several pre-drawn explosions, randomly selected at render-time to add a bit of variation
3.  Fairly centered/symmetrical/logical (eg.  explosion starts on engines, then cabin explodes, then chassis)