Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 16 hours ago

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This video shows you how to juice up any video game with good Game Design. Hit animations are the backbone of any video game and indicate to the player with an animation that something is happening to the player/npc instance. This state is a short lived one and normall between a quarter of a second or even shorter. The same method can also be used for buttons or any other gui elements.

Here we will go over the internal hit animation follow by other videos to external animations/effects on top.

To understand all this we need to seperate the internal hit animation into it's parts. The first part is the most common practise where the player/npc instance is being recolored/blended or shown with a low opacity (or even 0). This is being seen as a flashing or blinking to the player. The second part is to have a fully animated hit image to be swapped or just another sprite that resembles a hit. The third one is a squashing animation done mostly in code where the image scaling is being distorted and lerped into it's original scaling. Most games do use all 3 methods as a combination.

Tldr:
- recolor/low
- swap images
- squish and resize


🚧 For the future: There will be follow up video that shows these hit animations with code and a visual too how to do those in GameMaker and JuiceFx.

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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Flashing image by recoloring/blending
0:43 State based image swaps
1:06 Squashing the image and reshaping to the default
1:24 All previous parts combined for a hit animation