Creating Skill Animations?

Ok, so im trying to further hone my pixel arting skills. Ive been working on sprite and tiles in pixel art style, but I also want to make "Skill animations" that match...So, to those of you who have made skill animations before, or even if you havent but are familiar with the process, how do you go about it, and what tools do you use. Do you just build each frame, pixel by pixel (surly not...that sounds tedious)?

Well, there are many tricks to make animation look nice but don't take as much effort as you might think You'll probably want animations to go by fast, so using tricks is an efficient way of doing it. People won't notice/care (well, unless you're an amazing artist and animator, but let's not kid ourselves, 99% of us can only dream of being that great), as long as they don't have to wait for long periods of time between attacks. All that said, animating anything still takes time, even if you don't draw a whole lot of unique frames. And yeah, the more awesome you want your animation to look, the more time and effort you're going to have to put into it. :)

Gonna move this over to resource support.  This is the kind of discussion we created the section for.


I've made a few skill animations, it's pretty easy.  RM actually allows you to decide how many frames the animation is, which makes it easier to make things look smooth.  I used Pyxel Edit to create the animation, but now that I have Aseprite I'll be using that in the future.  Graphics Gale would work well too.  It's pretty much just like animating anything else, except that you have to do the timing twice, both when creating the frames and when setting up the actual animation in the editor.  I like to keep pieces of effects separate so that I can combine them in multiple ways in the editor.  So a sparkly star animation could both fall from the sky in a healing animation and radiate outward in an attack animation.


Edit:  Um, actually I do it pixel by pixel.  Yes, it does take forever.

X___X uggghhh....I was afraid of that. I dont mind doing extra work, but if i can get around it sometimes, I totally will. I know that some people use 3d animation (correct me if Im wrong, but it certainly looks it) to make the animations like what you get in that most recent animation pack on the RM store. I really have no idea how that stuff works, but I doubt that making "pixel art" animations would work the same way as they were made. Im just scouting my options. Im gonna look up that Aseprite you mentioned. Thank you for you input. :)


Also, sorry for posting in the wrong place.


@Milennin Thanks. Making them go by fast, thats a good tip. Still, I think a problem I'll run into would be making them go so fast they look choppy. I guess theres no quick way around it X_X ...