Roman Combat VFX

Roman Combat VFX gives flat-looking fights their weight back: nine hit, impact and command effects built for top-down and 3/4-view tactics, strategy and tower-defense games. Every effect comes twice — as smooth rendered sprites and as a matching pixel-art version — with the pivot and impact frame already worked out, so it lands exactly where the blow does.

The effects

• Sword contact — a steel slash arc, a white glint at the bite, silver sparks
• Shield contact — a blocked blow: flash, gold spark spray, bronze ring
• Arrow trail (loop) — a warm streak with shed motes to draw behind arrows and bolts
• Arrow contact — the arrow lands: flash, splinters, a puff of dust
• Ballista impact — the heavy one: flash, tumbling wood and stone, dust burst, shock ring
• Movement dust — kicked up by marching feet and charges
• Fire (loop) — burning ground with flame tongues and rising embers
• Commander rally — gold shock rings, a column of light, spiralling motes
• Selection pulse (loop) — a gold ring under the selected unit

What's in the download

• Every effect as a horizontal sprite sheet (2 px gutter) and as single frames
• Sizes: 256 and 128 px, plus a 64 px pixel-art version (hard alpha, dithered smoke, 24 colours) — 512 px in the HD add-on download (included)
• PNG and WebP
• One JSON per effect (and one combined): fps, loop flag, frame rectangles, pivot and impact frame for every size
• Bonus: a goofy Roman training dummy on a spring (idle bob, hit wobble, hop) with anchor points, so you can test every effect on a target
• vfx-player.js — a ~60-line canvas player you can use as-is or port
• A showroom demo: every effect staged on the training dummy (drag it around, it hops and kicks up dust), with specs and every frame; rendered / pixel art, three grounds

All nine share one camera and one world scale, so they sit together at matching sizes.

Works with

Anything that draws sprites: Godot, Unity, GameMaker, Phaser, PixiJS, LÖVE, your own engine. The README has the Godot and Unity import steps. No engine project is included.

Licence

Use in unlimited personal and commercial projects. Don't resell or redistribute the files. Full text in the download.

Free demo

Shield contact and selection pulse, both sizes and pixel art, with their JSON.