I've been having a lot of trouble trying to figure something out here.  I can handle regular/normal-ish sprite animations, and even do fun/simple things like make things move to a sine wave.  My vision here has been stymied by lack of knowledge/skill, though.

I'm trying to make a blob for Space Station 13, and my first attempt at re-spriting was decent (much better than what the game has right now), but it was a static image that had a horizontal wave motion but no opacity levels (found out that animated .gifs don't support that).  Luckily since then I found that the game animates series of .pngs in-engine.

I wasn't satisfied.  I want it to act more blob-like and I'm going to add eyes/teeth that appear and disappear.



tiled:



Here's the basic tile I came up with.  I want to animate this (and hopefully variations of it to make it interesting) so that it acts blob-like: pulsing, surging from one side to another, globs of material breaking from one part and absorbing into another all mercury-like.

Now, is there a good method to use?  A trick or something?  I tried downloading a Flash trial but I don't think that's what I want.  I couldn't figure shit out in there and what I did find doesn't seem to help.  Is there some method you guys can recommend or am I stuck doing it frame-by-frame, pixel-by-pixel, all by hand?