Miscellaneous NES Style Effects Critique

[heyguy]

Hello all! Would like some feedback on these game animations. I'm making a NES style game (limited with a NES color palette but with more frames of animations).  I plan on creating explosions, gun effects, collapsing level tiles/blocks (Metroid Style), and other effects. Here's an explosion I created.



I like it but it looks a bit...sloppy somehow. Would appreciate any help fixing it up.

I'm looking for a way to create animated environment tiles too. Here's an environment and an attempt at animating some flowing grass. I want to animate some of the other grassy tiles on the wall too.




It's hard! Any ideas or tips on how to animate grass and other small environment tiles would be helpful. I'm thinking about creating lights or panels that have slight animation too. Any critique on the environment would be helpful too. I think I might change the background from all black to something else. Anyway, thanks!

[MysteryMeat]

Took a crack at your explosion.

Some pretty sketchy fixes, but two big things:
you dwelled too long on the biggest part of the explosion, and you didn't have any darker smoke!

A list of what I did:
-tweaked the animation timing so it had a slight delay on the initial spark, to give the rest more of a POP. Also removed a frame of the larger part of the explosion.
-Added dark internal smoke.
-tweaked the last two frames to have more of a consistent line of motion between the dissipating smoke, it's not always applicable with explosions but try to stick to good clusters and tufts rather than individual pixels
-added a "shinespark" to it (that long pixel) to emulate lens flare.
-added some yellow "brights" to indicate plumes of fire lighting up the smoke from inside.

[TitanJack]

I would say literally one or 2 more frames would literally perfect your grass! Just know it's a NES game, nothing TOO advanced, so that it keeps that retro feel! but otherwise, I love it, it has a good nostalgic factor.

[heyguy]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

I took another attempt at making an explosion. Thanks a lot of the tips Mystery! This one is a little smaller and I originally intended it to be for a specific robot. I'll probably reuse it for all small robots though. Anyway, here's a few animations actually. A walk cycle, robot death animation, an explosion and a smoke trail coming from the corpse of the small destroyed robot.



Smoke is early WIP. It's pretty tough too! I've also worked on more of the foliage. I added one more frame to these and I think these two examples look a bit better than my previous. It's very short grass and leaves that would hang on the wall. Feedback would be appreciated!

[MysteryMeat]

Rotate the legs on the robot more for the walk, looks like an rpg idle animation.
Smoke's hard, try not to outline it. Ideally, look at some smoke gifs on google for ideas.
Like this!


Good idea might be to outline "puffs" of it with ovals then contour around those?

[heyguy]

Thanks for the feedback Mystery! The gif is very helpful. So I added a bit of a small leg swing to the bots. Here's another attempt at the smoke too. Still a work in progress but it's looking less sloppy and looping better in my eyes. Still needs some work though.

[MysteryMeat]

Didn't rotate the legs, I meant like this!
Might actually help to add a couple more, wouldn't be much trouble to do just some moving about and copy-pasting. I'd make them operate like the diagram, 1s synced with 1s and 2s synced with 2s:

1    2
   0
2    1

Try to study the gait of quadrupeds for inspiration!

[TitanJack]

Good job on refining the animation on the grass and leaves, I would simply say don't make it TOO smooth to keep the nostalgia factor. And remember on animations. NO FREEZE FRAMES!