I am new to Unity and this is my first thread here, hope I am not doing anything wrong.
I found a sprite of a popular game “Dead Cells”, which is this headless character swinging a sword. I made a screenshot of this pose from the game and I found that those blue glowing FX might be mapped by those purple-ish color from the sprite. I guess there is a common way for artist to create assets like this to tell programmer to generate good looking FXs.
I wonder if anyone had done this kind of thing before and could give me a hint how this can be done. Thanks!
This is how old school games used to apply FX on top of a sprite. The magenta and sometimes cyan colors used to represent either transparency or masked pixels so later - just like you said - the programmers would apply the FX to the colored area.
I never participated in 2D game development - back in the day - but have read and inspected enough sprite game assets of that time to know this was the process.
In Unity we don’t need to identify areas with those colors any more - now it is more common to use a mask image (I think) as before I’ve not done much 2D game development, but I know this isn’t a terribly difficult thing to accomplish in Unity. The 2D learn section might be helpful for you to check out, and other areas youtube and google will have a ton of information on adding FX to 2D sprites.
