Pixel VFX

100 animated pixel art effects: 20 effects, each in 5 colours. Explosions, hits, slashes, magic, fire, smoke, water and loot effects for top-down games, platformers and RPGs.

Licence in one line: use it in your commercial games; do not resell the files.

The 20 effects

• Explosion: a fireball that opens into a ring, with sparks
• Nova: an expanding magic ring
• Hit: an impact star for melee and bullet hits
• Slash: a sword swing arc
• Lightning: a bolt strike with a flash
• Projectile: a flying bolt with a flickering tail (points right)
• Charge: particles gathering into a glowing core
• Shield: a bubble with a moving shimmer
• Portal: a spinning gate
• Arc: an electric arc between two points
• Fire: a flame
• Smoke: a rising puff
• Dust: a landing or dash puff
• Shockwave: a ground ring for stomps and landings
• Splash: droplets and a ripple
• Splat: a burst with flying drops
• Bubbles: rising bubbles that pop
• Heal: rising plus signs over a ring
• Sparkle: twinkling stars
• Pickup: a burst for coins and loot

Colours: fire, ice, arcane, nature, holy, shadow, blood, steel, sand and smoke. Each effect comes in the five that suit it.

Made to drop in

• Sprite-sheet strips: one row of frames per animation, 32x32 px frames (48x48 for the two big ones).
• Every frame as its own PNG as well, and a GIF preview of every animation.
• 1x, 2x, 3x exports, pre-scaled and crisp.
• No outlines, no half-transparent pixels: the effects sit on any background.
• animations.json lists frame size, frame count, speed (12 fps) and whether it loops.
• Looping effects repeat cleanly: fire, portal, shield, bubbles, sparkle, arc and projectile.

Try before you buy

The free sample has 8 animations, one colour each.

Licence

Use and modify in personal and commercial projects. Shipping the effects inside your game is fine. No resale or redistribution of the assets, modified or not. Credit is appreciated, not required. Not for AI training or NFTs.

How it was made

Every frame is generated by code: rules for shape and motion, banded onto 5-colour ramps. The code was written with AI-assisted tools. No image generator was used, and no third-party art is included.

Missing an effect or a colour? Leave a comment: the pack gets updates.