Flamethrower VFX

See it running

What it does

• Twelve live parameters: emission, speed, length, spread, buoyancy, intensity, noise scale, animation FPS, distortion and lash density
• Five colour palettes — Classic Fire, Blue Plasma, Toxic Green, Violet Hellfire, White Hot
• Two custom shaders: an animated flame stream and a separate heat-haze distortion pass
• Marked @tool, so the effect renders and updates live in the Godot editor
• Exposed as a Flamethrower node the client can drop into any scene

Built for a client

Built to a written brief: an anime-style flamethrower a designer could retune without touching code. Delivered as a self-contained Godot node with exported ranges, palette presets and a demo scene for trying values out quickly.

The thought

The brief asked for a flame effect. What a team actually needs is one they can change at 2am without tracking down the programmer, so I built it as a tool from the start.

Mechanics

A fan-shaped jet emitted along the node’s local +X axis with the anime fire treatment drawn over it. Spread, length and buoyancy shape the cone. Noise scale and distortion break up the silhouette so it never reads as a repeating loop, which is the thing that gives most stylised fire away.

Systems

Every exported property runs through a setter that just marks the effect dirty instead of rebuilding straight away, so dragging a slider does not thrash the particle system. Palettes are data rather than branches, which is why adding a sixth colour is a one-line change.

Under the hood

Roughly 870 lines across three scripts and two shaders. flamethrower.gd owns the parameters and the dirty flag, flame_palettes.gd is a plain colour table, and demo.gd is nothing but the tuning UI. You can delete demo.gd and the effect still works, which was the point.

What the client said