an infernal hatch for you

Would you like an infernal hatch to drag everything you want to hell? Here you are!

You can use this sprite if you like.

In Zoltan’s city cats can be fall into one of these at any time.

But how do you design a hatch like this?

First thing I did was defining the hatch shape and making the flashing effect.

If you are familiar with old style games, you can see a lot of this effect in explosions. Basically an explosion always starts with a flash of light, and the simplest flash of light is obtained by alternating black and white. In this case I added red because I wanted a more colored and fire-like effect.

Then I decided to add some infernal red smoke. I used a cloud shaped brush in Photoshop and I started with red. I made a burst in the center of my hatch incrementing the red with any frame. Next I added orange and finally some yellow. Note that the brush became smaller with every colour.

Then I added some infernal light coming out of the hatch. I did this on the stitched spritesheet. I used a soft brush to trace rays and the adjusted the opacity to make the light stronger as the hatch opens.

Also I made sure to cut my light so that it stayed inside the frame of the hatch.

But I wasn’t happy with it, so I added some random sparks. The position of these doesn’t really care since they move random.

I created the hatch separately from the cat falling down, because in Zoltan, we can have cats of any colour. So the final animation is made of two sprites one over the other. I had to make sure to cut the cat so that it looked like it was inside the hatch in the very last frame.