Pixel Magic & Spell Effects – 16 Animated Fantasy Spells

A complete fantasy spell kit: 16 effects, 24 animations and 239 frames of crisp pixel art. Projectiles and beams also come in 4 directions.

Built around effects that chain together, so your abilities have a beginning, a middle and an end.

CHAINS

• Fireball → fireball impact: rolling flame projectile (loop) and a radial explosion with shock ring, smoke and embers
• Ice shard → ice shatter: faceted crystal projectile (loop) and a frost burst of tumbling shards
• Spell charge → energy beam: charge, hold and release, then a beam that fires, sustains and thins away. A tileable beam segment builds beams of any length
• Magic shield: a golden bubble that activates, shimmers (loop) and shatters
• Portal: tears open, swirls (loop), collapses
• Summoning circle: traces itself, erupts in a pillar of light, idles (loop)

PLUS

• Lightning strike: gathering sparks, a branching bolt, a flicker and a second strike
• Earth impact: stone spikes erupt with rock chunks and dust, then crumble
• Wind slash: a crescent blade of air with speed lines
• Water splash: crown splash, jet and ripples
• Arcane explosion: implosion, flash star, plasma shell and glitter
• Heal: ground ring, rising light streaks and crosses

4 DIRECTIONS Fireball, ice shard, energy beam and beam segment come ready-made facing right, left, up and down, as exact pixel copies (mirrored or turned 90°, never resampled) with matching anchor points.

READY TO USE

• Every frame as a transparent PNG
• Horizontal strip per animation at 1x and 4x, named _strip<N> for one-drag GameMaker import
• One packed atlas with Aseprite-style JSON (frame rectangles, durations, tags, pivots)
• animations.json with frame size, frame count, fps, loop flag and anchor for every animation
• GIF and APNG previews, contact sheet, and viewer.html to play any animation in your browser

TECHNICAL

• PNG RGBA, alpha only 0 or 255: no blur, no antialiasing
• Frames 32×16 to 64×64 px, 6 to 16 frames, 10 to 16 fps
• 8 seamless loops and 16 one-shots
• One palette per element, each with a dark rim, readable on dark and light backgrounds

HOW TO USE Import with nearest/point filtering, mipmaps off, no compression, and scale by whole numbers. Import notes for Godot 4, Unity and GameMaker are included. The Godot 4 steps were tested with Godot 4.3. For Unity and GameMaker the files were checked against each engine's import rules (strips named _strip<N> split automatically in GameMaker; strips slice cleanly with Unity's Grid By Cell Size); the Unity and GameMaker editors themselves were not run.

LICENSE Use in personal and commercial projects, modify freely. Do not resell or redistribute the files.