Invisibility effect

[Wingnut]

How would you go about doing invisibility in an efficient way?

I was thinking of portraying invisibility by drawing the background with a slight offset of a few pixels using the mask of my main character sprite but I hit into all kind of problems. The best I have so far is to use a mask of the character and multiply that mask with the graphics drawn with an offset.

 

[Phil7]

This is an interesting question. I never did something like this, but I had some random thoughts about it.

• I saw a jump n run game that had an invisible character by just displaying a hat or carrying a gadget, combined with all sorts of environment interactions like collisions, sound etc.
• Regarding your approach I was thinking about how glas would be represented in a simple way. You could scale the background instead of shifting it. Maybe a combination of dropshadow and highlighting to simulate specular reflection could help the illusion.
• Well, shaders again came to mind.

 

[Wingnut]

I was thinking of shaders as well for a while.. maybe it's time to learn them instead of avoiding them but there seem to be different ways across the web how to implement them. Shaderstoys got one way, Unity got one way and Cerberus-X have a its own way dealing them. Shaders should have a whole section of the forum .

But the accessory and sound -idea was a good one! I can implement that in this very second.

 

[Wingnut]

Another thing I could do easily is to create a second dithered version with mostly air and very few pixels visible together with low and maybe pulsing alpha.