Do you like sunburst effect in games? I do, and mostly on games with a cartoonish appeal.

If you follow me on Twitter – and you should, definitively – you noticed yesterday I published a video about a work in progress of a game I am developing where you can see an animated sunburst effect.

This is the part of the code today I want to share with you, have a look:

Now, let’s see how to do it. We have four graphic elements:

The background: a gradient which is stretched to cover the entire game area.

The top of the terrain: this is the grass, just a plain image

The rest of the terrain: a tile sprite, since we may need to cover a wider area than we expect, due to screen ratio.

And Finally, the ray itself. It’s just a triangle.

At this time you may think “Hey, it’s simple: let’s create a lot of rays forming a full circle and make them rotate by 360 degrees”.

It’s a nice idea, and it would work, it’s just a waste of resources. Why don’t we just create enough rays to cover the game area, rotate them with a tween and repeat such tween forever?

Look at the source code:

let game;
window.onload = function() {
    let gameConfig = {
        type: Phaser.AUTO,
        backgroundColor:0x1a213e,
        scale: {
            mode: Phaser.Scale.FIT,
            autoCenter: Phaser.Scale.CENTER_BOTH,
            parent: "thegame",
            width: 750,
            height: 1334
        },
        scene: playGame,
    }
    game = new Phaser.Game(gameConfig);
    window.focus();
}
class playGame extends Phaser.Scene{
    constructor(){
        super("PlayGame");
    }
    preload(){
        this.load.image("background", "background.png");
        this.load.image("ray", "ray.png");
        this.load.image("topground", "topground.png");
        this.load.image("bottomground", "bottomground.png");
    }
    create(){
        let background = this.add.sprite(0, 0, "background");
        background.setOrigin(0, 0);
        background.displayWidth = game.config.width;
        background.displayHeight = game.config.height;
        let raysArray = [];
        for(let i = -5; i < 6; i++){
            let ray = this.add.sprite(game.config.width / 2, game.config.height, "ray");
            ray.setOrigin(0.5, 1);
            ray.angle = i * 12;
            ray.displayHeight = game.config.height * 1.2;
            ray.alpha = 0.2;
            raysArray.push(ray);
        }
        this.tweens.add({
            targets: raysArray,
            props: {
                angle: {
                    value: "+= 12"
                }
            },
            duration: 8000,
            repeat: -1
        });
        let topGround = this.add.tileSprite(0, 1000, game.config.width, 128, "topground");
        topGround.setOrigin(0, 0)
        let topGroundBottom = topGround.getBounds().bottom;
        let bottomGround = this.add.tileSprite(0, topGroundBottom, game.config.width, game.config.height - topGroundBottom, "bottomground");
        bottomGround.setOrigin(0, 0);
    }
};

Lines 33-51 are responsible of doing it, and yes, it was easy and fun to create a sunburst effect with Phaser, in a few lines as always. Download the source code.