Colorful Animated Backdrops

With my distilled gameplay games I am making them simple, yet fun. As it happens simple can also mean that the games can be a bit static and boring, and I dislike static and boring.

So as with Heroic Buttons I am busy trying to get a nicely animated backdrop for Heroic Patterns. Let me go back to Heroic Buttons for a moment and describe what I did with that game. I have these lovely animated stars and I randomly place and animate them in the backdrop of the game, underneath everything that matters on the game screen. This supplies me with full screen colorful animation. I will add to this that drawing so many alpha'd sprites can wear on a machines ability, so on machines that are not as powerful I place few stars.

Now back to Heroic Patterns. Due to the nature of this game there is more real estate taken up by the patterns and also with the game the way works I really don't want to distract the player from the job of following the patterns. So what to do? Below is a picture of one thing I was trying, and although I tried to fraps the animation, for some reason the video has flashing in it so is useless.

Did I mention it was colorful? hehe.
I play this animation of an explosion rendered in various colors. This does in fact look incredible, only it is a bit distracting for the player, so I cannot use this. I am still not certain what to do. But something simpler is going to be necessary.

Ahh well, hopefully a picture soon of the final look  will be in this blog :)

Laters
Da Voodoochief