First Release

This is the first release of Ultimate Laser Pack. It's one of my first Pixel Art animations, besides some character sprites I did for a game that was published to a Game Jam a few weeks ago. It takes patience to draw and redraw the same sprite until it feels right, but I'm proud of my journey and I'm happy with the resulting animations.

I did each sprite in Photoshop, starting with the red laser. I struggled with juggling between layers to check for continuity of the flow, and to give the illusion of the laser beam particles moving left to right . There has to be a better, faster way to animate on Photoshop without switching on and off the layers for each frame, but I haven't figured it out yet.

I had some inspirations from Portal 2 lasers, and wanted to make it in a similar fashion when it was turned on or off: the beam instantly shines all the way through its path and grows width, instead of starting strong at the source and propagating until it reaches its destination. For the Inverted White laser, I was inspired by the Black Lightsaber from The Force Unleashed. I always thought it looked badass.

The test demo was made in Godot 4.3. There were a couple of times when I exported the spritesheets from Photoshop into Godot, to check for irregularities in the animation. I neglected the DRY coding principle several times in the making of this, remapping all spriteframe animations for each of the 10 laser colors, setting different phases for each of them. I thought about opening the .tres file (where the spriteframe animations are mapped) for the first laser I made, to see if I could change the path of the image to another laser variation, but that didn't work. So instead I decided to keep hitting my keyboard like a monkey with a typewriter until all 10 laser animations were working. Hey, at least I had a pattern to follow through!

The rest of the code was easy enough. It resulted in a single, intuitive although a bit clunky GDScript file. The buttons navigated through a list of paths of .tres files for each laser, and the toggle just changed the animation of each segment of the laser into their on or off phases.

Now, it's just a matter of waiting and maybe promoting this pack to see how people react to it, and see if they are requesting any changes or additions to the asset pack.

Thanks for reading!