Layer VFX

Overview

An effect is not an illustration of magic. It is a short, isolated piece of motion that an engine layers over gameplay, so it has to arrive with nothing around it, on a background the engine can remove, timed so a player reads it in a fraction of a second. Most failed effects fail on one of those three, not on how they look.

The route is: design the effect as a still, animate the still into a short clip, then pull frames from the clip into a flipbook. Generation mechanics and the spend gate are in the layer skill; motion prompting is in layer-video.

pack_sprite_sheet is named outright below because it is Layer's deterministic packing utility, a tool rather than a model, with no alternative to discover.

If a sibling skill named here is missing from your available skills, ask the user to install it (npx skills add layerai/skills --skill <name>); unattended, proceed from tool schemas and flag the gap.