BLOODY HELL
ASPARAGUS TREVOR'S GUIDE TO GOOD BLOOD EFFECTS

Now I like to think of myself as the Tom Savini of video-game gore. During game creation, blood and gore effects will take up a large amount of the time I spend, but it is worth it, and seems to go down well with everyone. Today I am going to try to share some of my secrets with you lovely people, and soon eveyone will have quality claret. I will presume you all know the basics of TGF and MMF.

First of all we need to determine what the graphical style of the game is. Does the game have a cartoony style, hand drawn visuals? Is it more realistic looking, e.g. 3D Rendered graphics or photograph quality images? I don't believe it is a good idea to mix graphical styles in any game. Mortal Kombat is an example of a game which mixes cartoony gore with photo-realistic graphics. It would have been different if I had made it lemmie tell ya.


Top down gore engines
For gore that will splat, I would use a minimum of two sprites, a Splat and a Spurt. The splat will be the sprite that stays around on the floor and the Spurt will be the thing that is shot out by a bullet hit or slice etc, and spawns the Splats.

On every frame of the spurt animation, the Action Point should be place in a random place, because this will be where the splat will be spawned from. In the Event Editor and make the blood spurt sprite destroy when the animation had finished. And at a random time, depending on how bloody you want it to be, make the Spurt shoot a Splat. There should be an Always event, making the Splat "Add Backdrop" and "Destroy."

So there you have it. Remember all gibs should leave splats and skids of blood, and a few random flying drips won't go amiss. Now for the graphical styles...

Realistic Gore
Say we are making a visually realistic game. We need to draw a sprite for the blood as it splatters on the floor. A single frame will suffice for this, and you should determine how big your characters are, and have the size of the blood splat in relation to the other sprites. In my opinion, it should be around a quater of the size of the main character sprite. Now for the graphic itself. Blood has a dark red colour, I'd say somewhere between 70 and 90 RED value and no BLUE or GREEN (R080-G000-B000), depending on how dark your game is. The best looking way I find is to have the blood sprite with an even darker patch in the middle of it. Now this object wants to be about 70% transparent.

Okay, so we have a splat, but we also need a spurt. I'd usually use 3D Studio MAX's meta-particles to create a nice blood spurting animation, but a well drawn and animated spurt will work just as well. The spurt should be slightly lighter than the splat, but not at all transparent.

Semi-Realistic Gore
Now if the game has a look of high quality pixel art, e.g. hand-drawn attempts at photo-realistic images, the best looking gore style I feel is blood using the And ink effect.The Splat sprite should be maximum red, that is the RGB value of R255-G000-B000. The And ink effect will do the rest, making any surface the splat is on tinted dark red. It's a cool effect. The spurt should fit the style of the graphics. It should be animated as above and the events should be the same also.

Cartoony Gore
No Ink effect on gore fits the style of cartoon graphics, so we should keep it solid coloured and brighter. I find the best colour to use for cartoony blood is the default dark red, RGB value R128-G000-B000. The sprites benefit from slight shading. There should be a highlight around the top and left sides using a slightly brighter red, and in some cases, maybe a shadow around the bottom and right sides, using a slightly darker red. The highlight should be dotted and about one pixel from the edge, but the shadow should be around the first pixel line and solid.


Gore Gravity
Now maybe you want to make a gory platform game. Now remembering the gaphical techniques from above, create your blood sprites. You'll need a Spurt and a Drip, and depending on whether you want the blood to splat on the platforms, a Splat. Now you should know how to make a character spurt blood when a blood spurting event happens. Now say we want some blood drips to go flying about, blood drips affected by gravity that splat on the floor. Now I would only reccomend Splats if your game has a three dimensional look to it, if the platforms look like they have some kind of depth. Otherwise your blood splats will look like they're floating.

Spurting and Dripping
Now where you would have blood splats spawn on a top down engine, instead we want blood drips, and they should only spawn the first few frames of the spurt. And they should be shot out at a speed determined by the leathalness of the blow.

Now we want the drips to gradually drop and hit the floor. You can do this two ways, you can gradually drop the position by a pixel or two, or you can use the Direction Calculator to rotate the drips to direction 24, the straight Down direction.

Splatting
Now when the blood drip collides with the backdrop, a blood splat should be spawned, following all the same rules as the above splats.

Spurts with gravity
Sometimes it looks good to replace the drips with spurts that do not splat on the backdrop objects. Simply have them Destroy when the animation is finished.


Fin
So there we have it. In no time at all, the dire gore seen all too often will be replaced with AsparagusTrevor endorsed blood and guts. Keep on blood-shedding.