Kristof was asking me how I made such hand-drawn looking effect sprites out of 3D particle effects. I figured that if he’d like to know, others might as well. So here’s what I do:

I start with a particle spray in Max (‘though you can use whatever 3D app you want.) Here I’ve made the particle system render with spheres and set the lighting to be high and centered. I export the entire animation out as separate frames with an alpha channel and bring them into Photoshop to compose this animated GIF:

fight cloud - 3D render

In Photoshop, I come up with an action to turn the sprite closer to the colors that I want. Here I took every frame, adjusted the levels, and multiplied by a yellow-tan color.

fight cloud - processed once

I take that animation and save it off as an animated GIF, mapping down to 4 colors. Here’s the GIF with the very limited palette:

fight cloud - mapped to 3 or 4 colors

Lastly, I re-import that file back into Photoshop and hand-paint the rest. I add a single pixel-outline, I adjust the colors more, and I make it look all nice. The clean-up can be a tad tedious… but it beats animating the entire thing by hand!

fight cloud - cleaned up

This isn’t the final sprite for the game: In this instance I’ll layer other puffs and things on top of it. But it does show my process for getting 3D particles to fit the style of the game.