SGDK Effects

Make effects readable and affordable without changing the game's rules. Follow the project's art direction and comfort settings; the Lab's lantern, colors and weather are examples, not a required visual style.

Establish ownership and cost

Find the existing renderer, camera, pools, palettes and frame loop first. Decide which effects are world-space, screen-space or attached to an emitter. Separate cosmetic particles from damage, collision and scoring. A missed spark must not change whether an attack hits. Use a cosmetic RNG stream rather than advancing the gameplay RNG when quality settings change.

Budget simulation work, RAM, resident tiles, queued transfers, whole-frame hardware sprites and per-scanline sprite counts/pixels separately. One SGDK Sprite can contain several hardware pieces. Transparent pixels still occupy the hardware rectangle. Reusing tiles saves VRAM/uploads, not scanline capacity.