I have a confession to make. If you've played the first area of Mort - and there's no reason why you shouldn't, since I'm offering a free demo of it - you'll notice there's a whole slew of spikes for you to avoid. However, originally I didn't want those hurdles to be spikes at all; I wanted it to be plumes of fire. After all, half of the game takes place in Hell, so it only makes senee that you'd need to contend with fire and brimstone.
Unfortunately, I am not the most accomplished artist. In fact, to be frank, I would consider myself to be quite unskilled when it comes to the arts. Every time that I attempted to animate a cool looking fire sprite, it always came out looking terrible. At the time I was finalizing those levels, I was racing against the clock, trying to finish up enough to submit the game to a number of festivals. Frustrated with my inability to animate, I went with the good old standby of spikes instead.
Fast forward several months later. This week, I saw on IndieDB an article for a game I've been following, and in it, I was extremely impressed with the way they handled animating fire. You can see that article here. (And honestly, if you're not following Path to the Sky, you really should. It looks amazing). I felt a rush of inspiration, and briefly ditching all the coding I've done recently, I played around with Unity's particle systems to see if maybe that was the solution to my inability to render good looking fire.
This was the result:
I may write up a tutorial on how I achieved this with Unity, but needless to say, I'm quite happy with it. I can't wait to rebuild those levels with the fire I always intended for them to have.
That fire looks great man! You said this game is being made with unity? That's awesome.