Every gallery before this one drew its effects live, formula by formula, every frame. This page teaches the other half of how real games ship VFX: draw the animation once, into a strip of transparent frames — a sprite sheet ("flipbook", if you learned the word from Unreal) — and then play it back by doing nothing cleverer than choosing which rectangle to copy. The alphabet runs four times, so every letter owns four effects. Laps one and two teach the machinery (Aura to Zap, Afterimage to Zzz); laps three and four are genre laps — sci-fi beams and glitches, fantasy frost and quills, arcade jackpots and invaders, cozy axolotls and kettles, goofy waddles and yolks — a picture-book to skim until you recognise the effect you were imagining, then open its code and turn its numbers. Each card bakes its own sheet from code the moment it wakes (no image files anywhere), then never draws the effect again. The filmstrip under each card is the actual baked texture, checkerboarded so you can see the transparency; the amber cell is the frame being copied right now. Press ▶ Run all, or wake one card at a time — click a running card to move a loop or retrigger a one-shot where you point.
The whole technique is two lines. A loop plays frame ⌊t·fps⌋ mod N; a one-shot plays min(N−1, ⌊(t−t₀)·fps⌋) and bakes its last frame empty so "holding on the end" and "the effect is over" are the same statement. Everything else is bake-time craft, and the five families each teach one piece of it: seamless loops phase on i/N (never i/(N−1)); one-shots clamp instead of wrapping; smoke plays source-over while light plays additive; magic runs many offset clocks through one strip — and lightning re-rolls its dice every frame, because chaos reads as energy. A transparent flipbook is the closest thing VFX has to a universal shipping container: the same sheet works in every engine made this century.
Every effect is one function, make(u), returning { frame(dt, t), press(x, y) }. The star of the kit u is bake(N, size, draw) — it hands your draw function a frame kit f once per frame (f.g the pen, f.S/f.c cell size and centre, f.k = i/(N−1) for one-shots, f.kl = i/N for seamless loops, plus dot, glow, ring, streak, wedge, star, poly) and returns the finished sheet. Playback is blit(sheet, i, x, y, scale, "add"?) — one rectangle copy — and strip(sheet, i) draws the filmstrip. Also in the kit: scene(), mote(x, y) (the hero, back from the lexicon), rng(seed) (seeded random — same seed, same numbers, coherent frames), clamp, ease, TAU. Edit a number, press ▶ Run — the sheet re-bakes fresh from your code.
The preview is bigger than the cards, and playback is just a rectangle copy — the same sheet at any scale. Click the preview to move a loop or retrigger a one-shot where you point.
N to 4 and watch the breath turn into a stutter — frame count is the resolution of time. Change a loop's phase from f.kl to f.k and the loop pops once per lap (now you know what a loop seam looks like; change it back). Play Dustkick with "add" and the dirt becomes holy. Halve a one-shot's FPS and the same 10 frames become slow motion — the sheet never changes, only the reading speed. The universal anatomy: bake the drawing once, choose a frame with arithmetic, copy a rectangle. That one sentence is the entire technology.In Godot: all 104 are ported — flipbook.gd bakes every sheet in a SubViewport at startup, slices it into AtlasTexture regions, and plays them through SpriteFrames + AnimatedSprite2D — the engine's native flipbook machinery, fed entirely from code (grab the Godot project and press its menu's G) — and Godot alone also gets a depth sibling, flipbook_vfx.gd (menu key H): one 8-frame loop wearing a rim-glow shader, a loop-locked aura, a circuit track, and click-bursts, with its own long-form cheatsheet on the four clocks that drive effects around a playing flipbook. In Unity the same sheet becomes multiple Sprites over one Texture2D (or the Particle System's Texture Sheet Animation module, or Shader Graph's Flipbook node) — FlipbookVfx.cs bakes and plays one in ~200 lines. In Unreal it's Paper2D's literal PaperFlipbook in 2D and SubUV (materials and Niagara both speak it) in 3D — the recipe and SSFlipbookVfx.* cover both spellings. Chapter 15 is the full encyclopaedia entry: where flipbooks beat live drawing, the four platforms' native machinery, and how to bake, import, and premultiply without tears.