Workshop Effects - 90 timed pixel FX in three palette moods

90 timed pixel effects for the moments that make a 2D game feel good: a hammer landing, a coin snapped up, a frost burst, a lightning strike, rain over a graveyard, a sleepy "Zz" over a guard's head. Every effect comes in three moods drawn from the same frames and swapped by palette: warm workshop, cold eerie, and plain conventional hues for games that are neither cosy nor spooky. They come ready for Godot 4.6, with plain frames, strips and timing data for any other engine.

Try it first: the free sample below has six full effects (hit_small, candle_flame, chimney_smoke, coin_collect, drip and wisp) in all three moods, with their .ase files, palettes, timing data and a Godot example. The Python sources come with the full pack only.

What's new in 2.0

• 45 new effects, doubling the pack: ice, lightning, poison, wind, weather and ambience tiles, gameplay feedback and status markers.
• A third mood, plain: orange fire, blue water and ice, green poison, yellow lightning, for every effect old and new.
• Your 1.0 imports don't change. Every warm and eerie frame of the original 45 effects is byte-identical to 1.0.0.

What you get

90 effects in thirteen families:

• Impacts (8): small, large and directional hits, slash, crit star, shock ring, clang, anvil strike.
• Fire and sparks (9): torch, candle and forge fire, flame burst, explosion, ember pop, rising embers, fuse spark, grinding sparks.
• Smoke, steam and dust (10): smoke and soot puffs, vanish poof, chimney smoke, steam wisp, steam hiss, dust on step, landing, dashing and bursting.
• Pickups (6): coin collect, glint, star burst, heart pop, idle sparkle, rising heal.
• Water (7): small and big splash, drip, rain hit, ripple, bubble pop, rising bubbles.
• Eerie wisps (5): wisp, spirit flame, soul rise, wisp burst, summon gather.
• Ice (5): frost burst, ice spike, ice shatter, freeze crust, frost glint.
• Lightning (5): bolt strike, small zap, charge-up, arc loop, static sparks.
• Poison and acid (5): venom hit, acid splash, poison puff, poison cloud, poison bubbles.
• Wind (3): wind gust, wind lines, dust devil.
• Weather and ambience (10): rain and heavy rain, snow and heavy snow, dust motes, fireflies and falling leaves as seamless 32×32 tiles; a drifting leaf; foam edge and waterfall foam for your own water.
• Feedback (6): level-up, heal burst, item pickup, shield block, shield bubble, parry flash.
• Status markers (11): small over-head icons for alert, question, stun, sleep, burning, frozen, poisoned, buff, debuff, love and sweat.

Across the whole set:

• Three moods for every effect: warm (fire, soot and brass), eerie (teal and violet) and plain, with matching .gpl palettes in the same 46-slot order.
• Stated timing. One-shots and loops, 6 to 20 fps, with per-frame holds. A contents.json gives each effect's size, fps, holds, duration, kind and spawn anchor. One-shots end on an empty frame, so nothing vanishes mid-shape.
• Native sizes from 8×8 to 48×48 (the lightning bolt is 24×64), drawn at 1×. Each comes as individual frames and as a strip (indexed PNG).
• Godot 4.6: SpriteFrames for every effect in all three moods, a WorkshopEffect node that frees itself after a one-shot and can switch moods live, and a playground. Click to spawn, cycle effects, jump between families, swap moods, change the ground and play at ×0.25 slow motion.
• Editable sources. One indexed Aseprite (.ase) file per effect, with every frame and its duration. You also get the Python sources that draw every frame, so you can retime, recolour, add your own mood or redraw an effect and rebuild the whole set.

Good to know

• Made for dark and mid ground first. Impacts, feedback and markers carry a dark edge that holds them on light ground too. Ambience has no edge, so snow, fireflies, dust motes and static sparks are faint on cream or white; on a light scene, use the eerie or plain mood or darken the slot.
• Tile the rain and snow with each row shifted a little (for example 0, 13 and 26 px) and the grid disappears in wide scenes.
• Scale by whole multiples with nearest-neighbour filtering.
• The scenes in the pictures use props and characters from Goblin's Tinkers' Row, Stewpot Kitchen and Lantern-lit Hollow packs as scenery. They are not included here. This pack contains the effects only.
• Fixed frames, not a particle system. No sound is included. Ground fog is not included: it needs soft transparency that this indexed style doesn't have.
• Tested in Godot 4.6.1 (GL Compatibility, Linux): the example was freshly extracted, imported and run, and every effect was played as a continuous movie at full speed and slowed down. LibreSprite 1.3 reopened every .ase file. Aseprite itself and other engines weren't tested; the PNGs, strips and JSON are plain files any engine can read.

Licence

You may use the effects in commercial and personal games and modify them. Attribution is optional. You may not resell or redistribute them as assets. The Godot example and the build toolkit are MIT. The effect drawings, including their Python sources, are under the art licence. Both licences are included in the download.

AI disclosure

This pack was made by an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic), which drew every effect frame by frame in code. No image generator was used. The download includes a short provenance note.