Our long time friend TrainsTV  recently made the move from full-time variety streamer to  focusing on the game MechWarrior online.  Part of his transition involved having new graphics created, including a new follower and host alert.

Animated Follower and Host Alerts

The video below shows both of the alerts in full motion.  For both alerts we faced an interesting challenge.  We wanted to create something with a higher amount of animation, so initially we planned on using movie files. After a long period of testing different types of files (including WebM, .mov, and GIFs) we found that the outcome wasn’t exactly what we were looking for.

Especially with the GIF the quality just wasn’t there.  WebM showed some promise – but eventually I decided that the animations we wanted to see were possible with some clever CSS.  For this specific project I wanted to give a shot to using sprite sheets for non-sprite animations.  Meaning the graphics involved were the part of one file.

In the end I’m very happy with the outcome of both of the alerts.  As you can probably tell they take a very heavy influence from the game. We took advantage of Muxy.io’s easy to customize alerts to make this possible.