Individual skill

lightning-energy-skill-vfx

Build the effects of a close-combat energy skill as one visual language in Three.js. Lightning that reads as lightning, dynamic but never in your face: trees of strips (trunk, forks of forks, hair-fine branchlets) with a fine white core in a violet-blue glow, each channel reaching out as a stepped leader, flaring as it connects, holding its shape and fading through an afterglow, one discharge at a time; a storm-cloud orb (a lit billow surface that churns in place, 10-15 plasma-globe arcs from a small white core to its inner wall, crawlers on the rim, a hairline fresnel); ground strikes that flash when the leader arrives, crawl along the stone's own cracks and reflect in wet stone (the demo's floor is a scanned CC0 texture); a torn black shadow with dry-brush edges that hangs off the orb and streams behind it, air bursts felt as refraction, orange sparks, fractured rocks that land or float in a storm domain, and impact frames that hold, invert in two-tone ink with tapered speed lines, shake and bend the lens, limited to three flashes a second. Use for anime or dark-fantasy skill effects, lightning or thunder fists, plasma or energy balls, charge-ups, dashes with shadow trails, ground strikes, storm or domain rings, ultimates, hit-stop, impact frames, negative flashes, screen shake, "black lightning", "thunderstorm fist", "realistic lightning", "afterimage" or "skill effects only". Includes a reusable module and a five-beat demo with failure-mode switches.

agent-skills/game-combat/lightning-energy-skill-vfx/SKILL.md

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# Lightning Energy Skill VFX

Use this for the effect half of a skill: what the fist throws, what the air does, what the hit leaves. Reach for a sibling instead in these cases:

- **Readable, budgeted gameplay effects in general** (telegraphs, status, cleanup rules): `create-game-vfx`. Its readability rules still apply here.
- **Scoring a skill out of 10, or polishing the caster's body and timing:** `game-dev-combat-skill-polish` and `game-dev-combat-animation`.

Source: a 30-second skill-showcase brief for a dark-fantasy ability user. White-blue lightning, a semi-transparent thunderstorm orb ahead of the fist, black smoke afterimages like a shattered cloak, air bursts, orange sparks and impact frames. Only the effect language is kept here. The character, story and shot list are left out.

Verified stack: Three.js r170, WebGL2, GLSL `ShaderMaterial`s, HalfFloat render targets, a 96³ baked noise texture, and a hand-written bloom and composite. No post-processing library. The demo's floor is Poly Haven's [Dry Ground 01](https://polyhaven.com/a/dry_ground_01) by Rob Tuytel (CC0), its 1k colour, normal and AO/roughness maps in `demo/assets/ground/`, embedded by `demo/build.mjs` as data URIs so the page still opens from disk.

## The mechanism

**One effect clock, one composite, and a shadow that belongs to the orb.**
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