Controls you meet everywhere
The coin, every trail, every sparkle and every hit are built from the same handful of controls. Learn them once here and the rest of the tool is just a different shape of the same thing.
This is the most useful page in the help. Everything below appears on four different tabs, so the twenty minutes you spend here save you reading the same thing four times.
The layer card
On the Trails, Sparks and Hit tabs the work happens in layer cards - stacked boxes, up to four per tab. One card is one visual element. Two glow layers means two glows drawn on top of each other, each with its own image and settings.
[common_01 - One trail layer card, expanded, panel width 410 px. Numbered callouts: 1 = the name field, 2 = Mute, 3 = Solo, 4 = the triangle that folds the card, 5 = the group headers inside (Image sequence, Transform, Look, Over life). Do not highlight individual sliders.]
Every card has the same header:
- The name - click it and type. Names travel into the export and the performance display, so "gold sparks" beats "Sparkles 2" when a programmer opens your file.
- Mute - hide this layer without deleting it.
- Solo - hide everything except this layer.
- Remove - delete the layer. There is no undo, so mute first if you are unsure.
Inside, the card is split into folding groups, always in the same order: Image sequence, Transform, Look, Over life, and on the Sparks tab also Emission and Forces.
Mute and Solo
These two are how you find out what a single layer actually contributes.
Mute - this layer stops drawing. It stays in the file with all its settings.
Mute a layer, launch, unmute, launch again. Now you know exactly what it was doing.
A muted layer is exported as switched off. That is deliberate - a parked experiment should not ship - but it means you must unmute anything you do want in the game before you export.
Solo - only the soloed layers draw; the coin and all other layers are hidden.
Solo one sparkle layer while dialling its forces in. You can solo several layers at once to see how two of them read together.
Solo is for working only. It is never saved and never exported.
Mute beats Solo: a layer that is muted stays hidden even if you solo it. If something is invisible and you cannot work out why, the isolation bar in the panel header lists everything that is currently hidden, with a Clear solo button.
Each tab also has one master switch at the top - Show trail, Show sparkles, Show pot hit, Show coin - which turns off that whole tab at once. That switch is saved and exported.
Double-click a name to reset it
Every slider, dropdown, curve and gradient resets to its normal value when you double-click its name (the text label, not the slider itself). Double-click again and your old value comes back.
This is the safety net that makes experimenting free. Drag anything anywhere; two clicks put it back.
It does not work on tick boxes, because a double-click on those already ticks and unticks them.
Double-click a number to type it
Every slider shows its value beside its name. Double-click that number and a small box opens: type the value and press Enter, or click somewhere else. Esc leaves the value as it was.
The number you type is kept exactly. It is not rounded to the slider's steps, and it can go past either end of the track. When the track cannot show it, the thumb parks at the nearest end and the number turns the tab's colour. The typed number is the one the preview uses, the save keeps and the export ships.
Use it where one unit matters: Gravity 1235 when the slider jumps by 10, a launch gap of 10 ms on a track that starts at 300, a Gravity of 9000 on a track that stops at 8000.
Drag the thumb, or press an arrow key on it, and the typed number is dropped: the slider is back on its track from where the thumb sits. A few values keep their limits because they mean something only inside them (a share from 0 to 1, a seed that starts at 1); there the number shows what was used.
Image sequence - the picture
Every layer draws a picture: a glow blob, a spark, a star, a coin. A sequence is one picture, or a row of pictures played as an animation.
Upload image(s) - pick one file for a still picture, or several files at once for an animation. They play in file name order, so name them spark_001.png, spark_002.png and so on.
A soft white blob with a transparent edge, saved as PNG, is the most useful glow you can make. White, because the tool can tint it any colour afterwards.
Uploads live in your browser until you save. Always use Save Settings before closing the tab.
Use bundled - throws your upload away and goes back to the picture that ships with the tool.
Playback - Play once runs the animation one time. Loop repeats it. Ping-pong plays it forward then backward.
The coin is set to Loop so it keeps spinning. Everything else starts at Play once, which is what you want for a spark that is born, flashes and dies. A stage element loops too, so an animated backdrop keeps going.
Start frame - Frame 0 starts every copy at the first picture. Random starts each one somewhere different.
Random, whenever you emit many particles from the same sequence - otherwise they all flash in step and the eye spots the pattern immediately.
Frames - how the animation advances. By FPS plays at a fixed speed. Stretch to life squeezes the whole animation into each particle's lifetime, so it always finishes exactly as the particle dies. Random image is not an animation at all: each particle gets one picture from the upload, picked at random, and keeps it for life.
Stretch to life for a spark that should complete its little animation before vanishing. Random image with 20 to 30 different snowflakes, flies or dust specks uploaded together, for a field where no two look alike.
With Random image, Playback and Start frame grey out: a held picture has nothing to play.
In the Atmospheric journey the item can carry more than one set of frames: a Variants group under its picture takes up to eight extra uploads, and each item wears the main set or one variant for its whole life. Use that for three animated fish; use Random image above for thirty stills of the same kind of thing. See the Coin / Item tab.
Sequence FPS - the speed, in pictures per second, used by By FPS.
15 is the tool default and reads well. Below 8 starts to look like a flicker book.
Transform - fixing the picture
Transform corrects the image itself: too big, upside down, off centre, facing the wrong way. The point of this group is that you can fix an export here instead of going back to Photoshop and re-exporting. The same group sits on every stage element card of the Board tab, where it turns, mirrors and scales the picture you design against.
At the top of the group there is a small preview of the picture with a cross showing the pivot, the pixel size, and a Reset button.
[common_02 - The Transform group expanded on a coin, panel width. Red box around the 96 px preview thumbnail and its pivot cross. Small callout arrow labelled "pivot" pointing at the cross.]
Scale - overall size, from 0.1x to 10x, with 1x in the middle of the slider.
Draw your spark small (say 64 px) and scale it up here. A smaller picture means a smaller game download.
Scaling a small picture up a long way makes it blurry. If it looks soft on screen, it will look soft in the game.
Aspect - width only. Above 1 makes it wider, below 1 narrower. 1 is the picture as drawn.
0.4 turns a round glow into a vertical streak.
Rotation - turns the picture itself, clockwise. This happens before any flight direction or spin, so use it to straighten art that was exported at an angle.
Pivot X / Pivot Y - which point of the picture sits on the path. Measured in picture pixels from the centre; X is right, Y is down.
For a comet drawn with its head at the left edge, move the pivot to the head. Now the head follows the path instead of the middle of the picture.
The pivot is also the point everything spins around. A wrong pivot is the usual reason something wobbles instead of turning cleanly. Tick Show pivots in the panel header to see the point as a crosshair on the flying item.
Mirror X / Mirror Y - flip the picture. The pivot flips with it, so a pivot on the comet head stays on the head.
Look - colour and blending
Opacity - the basic see-through level of the whole layer. The opacity curve (below) multiplies on top of this. The coin, and the item in the Atmospheric journey, have the same slider under their Blend mode: one knob, the same meaning everywhere.
Blend mode - how this picture mixes with what is already on screen. Four choices:
- Normal - paints on top, like a sticker.
- Add - adds light. Overlaps get brighter and burn out to white. This is what makes something look like it glows.
- Screen - a gentler Add. Brightens without burning out as fast.
- Multiply - darkens. Rarely used for effects; useful for a shadow or a smoke smudge.
Add for anything that should look like light: glows, sparks, flashes. Normal for a solid object like the coin.
Add on a bright background looks washed out. Check it over your real game screenshot, not on black.
Tint over life - colours the picture, and lets that colour change as the particle ages. See the gradient section below.
Whiten image before tinting - strips your picture's own colours before the tint is applied.
This is the one that trips everyone up. Read the warning below.
Tint by target / line colour - also multiplies by the colour of the pot the coin is flying to (Coins mode) or the colour of the line glow (Win lines mode).
One trail layer that automatically turns gold, blue or red depending on which pot the coin is heading for. Build it once instead of three times.
Draw above the coin - puts this layer in front of the coin instead of behind it.
On for a sparkle that should dance in front of the coin; off for a trail that should be hidden behind it.
Why did my picture turn black? Tinting works by multiplying colours. A cyan picture multiplied by a red tint gives black - that is arithmetic, not a bug.
So: tint white or grey pictures. If you must tint a coloured one, switch on Whiten image before tinting first - it removes the colour and keeps the shape and softness. The glows that ship with the tool are whitened automatically whenever you tint them.
Over life - the curves
"Life" means the time from when something is born to when it dies: for a spark, its own lifetime; for a trail, the length of the flight. A curve lets a value change over that time instead of staying flat.
In the curve box, left is birth and right is death. Up is more, down is less.
[common_03 - A Size over life curve editor, panel width, showing a grow-then-shrink shape with three points and the middle one selected. Label the left edge "birth", the right edge "death", the top "more", the bottom "less" - small grey text outside the box, not covering the curve.]
- Click empty space in the box to add a point.
- Drag a point to move it.
- Double-click a point, or select it and press Delete, to remove it. The two end points cannot be removed.
- Smooth / Linear - rounded transitions between points, or straight lines. Smooth for nearly everything; Linear when you want a hard, mechanical change.
- Preset... - replaces the curve with a ready-made shape: Constant, Fade in, Fade out, In-out, Quick in slow out, Pulse, Grow, Shrink. The fastest way to get started.
The two curves you will use constantly:
Size over life - how big the picture is at each moment of its life.
Preset Shrink for a spark that fades out to a pinpoint. Preset Grow for a shockwave.
Opacity over life - how visible it is at each moment.
Almost always end at 0. Anything that vanishes at full strength pops, and a pop reads as a bug to a player.
A short fade-in at the start (the first 10%) hides the harsh moment a particle appears.
The tint gradient
The colour bar works like the curves, but with colours instead of heights. Left is birth, right is death.
- Click below the bar to add a colour stop.
- Drag a stop to move it in time.
- Select a stop, then use the colour box and the number field beside it (0 = birth, 1 = death).
- Double-click a stop, or press Delete, to remove it. Two stops always remain.
The classic fire look: white at birth, yellow at 0.2, orange at 0.5, deep red at death. Anything hot starts pale and cools as it ages - and that is why a fire particle reads as fire.
Variation
The Trails, Sparks and Hit tabs each have a small folded Variation group above the layer cards, with one slider.
Variation - how much each individual copy differs from the settings. 0% means every flight and every burst is identical.
15% to 30%. Enough that two bursts are never quite the same, not so much that your careful tuning stops showing.
It shifts different things per tab: trails vary in size and length; sparkles and hits vary their direction, swirl, spin, speed and timing.
Repetition is what makes an effect look cheap. A player who sees the same burst forty times will notice. A little variation is the cheapest possible fix.