Hi everyone, it’s me SmearKees back with some juicy handdrawn effects
Recently the game Lethal League Blaze got released. My first shipped game that contains some of my 2D effects!!!
All the effects in the game are 2D handdrawn, I like to share some of the FX I made for the game and the design process for certain 2D gameplay effects. I had some great supervising from the Team Reptile team with there amazing and unique style knowledge.
Enjoy and if you’ve some questions feel free to ask as I’ll update work in the future
Dice his super ability was a lot of fun to work on. During the concepting phase I had to keep in mind that Dice was already in the game Lethal League so there were a few guidelines that I had to keep in mind.
Some of the guidelines:
Dice can curve the ball in different directions
Do not deviate too much from the original design
The effect needs to lean to japanese style of effects instead of the fluid magical fx
Well the team was very specific about the style that they wanted for the game, as you can see the game has alot of japanese influance and with the 2D fx style I had to set up a style for the game that leans more to traditional japanese effects. We used particle systems but that’s only for certain eclipse effects for in the background.
Grid is one of the new characters in Lethal League Blaze and one of my favorites to play with. The way we tackled Grid his super went pretty fast and we knew what we wanted after a few concepts. Grid is all about the electricity and everybody knows electricity is cool!
Some of the guidelines:
Grid can only teleport horizontal and vertical
Give the player/opponent visual feedback where Grid will teleport to
We love super smash bros and my supervisor adviced me to take a look at Mewto. We took the teleport effect from mewto for some further concepts and then we came up with the final pass for Grid his effect. The special thing about the teleport effect is that at entry of activation a little star stays on the place you teleport from, this is great for gameplay feedback.
I’m back with a new character super and today I introduce you to the super fx from Sonata. Sonata was already in Lethal League so I had to keep the original design in mind during te concepting phase.
With the new super fx we wanted to visualize a “sound beat” that slams the ball in de direction the player is aiming.
Some of the guidelines:
Don’t deviate too much from the original design
Visualize it in a way that the “sound beats” slam the ball
I just want to say that I love Lethal League, was a fan for the first game and Blaze is one of the best sequels I’ve ever played. I love how it’s not “deviated too much” from the original design. Excellent work! Cheers!
Thanks alot man. My supervisor was really hammering on a specific style we wanted to have for the sequel regarding the FX, this was a challenging but super fun task knowing that it was my first ever project working as an VFX artist :D.
It’s your lucky day because I still have some unposted stuff
Let me introduce you to the very cool and awesome bubbly skater, JET!!!
Jet was very straight forward, she can skate and her super is water. When Jet uses her super she encapsulates the ball in a bubble for a certain duration before it pops, after the bubble pops the ball emits water and can give special gameplay technics to Jet her kit
I was very inspired by the special attacks of windjammers, especially for the first concept where the water splashes in a vertical direction as it gives a nice sense of speed.
After testing the effect we decide to still lean to another design that I made as the vertical splashes turned out to feel and work different then we had in mind.
So eventually the second concept that we decide to put in the game is the bubble, gameplay and visually it really suits Jet and completes her overall kit.
