In this day and age I found just using code can alleviate a lot of the stress that comes with making explosions. It doesn't even have to end up looking "out of place." At first I tried pixelling an explosion but it was way too much work. Eventually what I did was create a base explosion(an orb of light exploding into a small ball of smoke, and a "halo" puff of smoke that exploded out from that), then used some code to make the smoke. The smoke was just a single image generated x3-4 times, all with random rotations and sizes, and they spun and faded away. It was a much better effect than I could have done attempting to pixel it, and since the images themselves were clean it ended up fitting in perfectly and looking different for each explosion. The key is to focus less on code generating the effect, and more on letting code do all the crude work you'd end up doing, and providing it with nice images to work with(instead of say, typical orb of light emitters generally use in the hundreds).
When coding this would generally be done with an emitter, though I didn't use it for my particular case.
