In the last 70 days I animated all 122 skills currently in Fogworld. Today I want to show you a few of my favorites and share what I learned while making the animations.

Showcase

Here are 10 of my favorite animations, you can see more on Fogworld’s bluesky page.

Lessons learned

Sell the Impact

The lesson I learned the fastest was that you need to use every tool in your repertoire to make skills feel like they’re hitting hard. What worked best for me was a mixture of screenshake, making the target flash red and using base heavy sounds. Sprites in Fogworld aren’t animated, but this would be a great place to add a ‘hurt’-animation.

Don’t waste the Player’s Time

Since combat makes up the majority of Fogworld’s gameplay and players will see the same skill animations dozens if not hundreds of times, skill animations need to be as short and snappy as possible. “I like it, but it takes too much time.” was one of the most common complaints I heard. Especially in spammable skills even a fraction of a second matters.

Less is more

When creating skill animations it was very tempting for me to just add more sparks here or a bit of fire there to sell the impact of the skill. What I learned very quickly was that this is a trap that makes the animations hard to parse for the player. Even for hard-hitting skills it was usually better to not add too many particle effects and instead rely on other elements like sound.

Create Symbols

Skill animations aren’t just pretty to look at, they can even be tools to teach players what the skill does without having to read a description. By reusing similar effects you can create symbols that the player can parse intuitively. For example, a sphere of particles always means that the target is getting protected in some way and healing skills all use a certain sound.

What’s next?

With skill animations finished, the next point on my plan is UI/UX. This is a large topic, since Fogworld’s UI is currently entirely made up of placeholders. I’ll start by reworking the combat UI, which has a bunch of glaring issues that were found during testing and will now finally get fixed.

As always, please follow Fogworld on bluesky and join the discord server, so you’ll never miss an update.

Until next time, have a great day!