Mind if anyone give me any tips and ideas on spriting effects? Smoke, fireballs, etc. I can't ever seem to go anywhere farther from a simple ball.

heh funny. Im doing the opposite, going from detailed effects to simple ones.

In any case, the way I do them is pretty akward for some, but I like it and the animation looks somewhat fluid. Lets take a smoke ball for instance, starting from the largest smoke and fading away into a tiny smoke that dissappears in the end.

I first decide on the size of the effect and make a new picture of that size (20x20 pixels for example)
Now I grab the almighty airbrush, set it to dark grey, and start spraying a simple ball of smoke. Then I switch to a lighter grey color and spray over the dark ball of smoke while leaving the edges slightly dark.
I repeat that with a 3rd layer of a even brighter grey and shazam. First frame done.


Now I save as that frame and then continue spriting the next one on top of this one. Since were going for large smoke -> tiny dissapearing smoke, I take the airbrush again and start chopping away pixels around the smoke ball to make it tad smaller and then do the 3 layer airbrush thing over the remaining smoke blob to make it random from the previous one. Otherwise you'd have a blob that looks like smoke, but instead of being animated that its getting smaller and dissapearing, it would look like its being eaten from the edge to the center until there is no smoke blob. Airbrushing over the each last frame with new layer of dark grey, lighter grey and even brighter grey makes it look like good, animated smoke.

Anyways, after youre done with this frame, save as the next frame of the animation youre making and continue spriting the next frame from this one and repeat until the end.



This above method works great on random uni-direction effects like smoke, gas, electricity and fireballs.
It also helps at looking at videos and studying pictures in detail to see how the effect behaves. And then try animating it in a very simple form (with just 1 or 2 colors) and from there, improving and detailing them further.

Yes, finding images and videos of the phenomenon in question is a great way to figure out how it looks, and how you might "digitize" it in pixel form. It's how I figured out my flamethrower.