For game art in general, Riot games released a series of videos on their Youtube channel that explain the different areas.

And for animation, we think every animator would agree that "the animator's survival kit" is THE BOOK. As it explains the basics that pretty much every animation follow.

Now, specifically for games, we are big fans of the YT channel "New Frame Plus". Dan really loves animation, and you can notice from his videos, he explains in detail every aspect of the animations and why they do or don't work well.

Also, https://80.lv/ and https://polycount.com/ very good sources of information and feedback regarding everything in the world of art for games.

I did most of the stuff either by hand (using Procreate) or Illustrator. Drawing by hand just makes me... kinda happy. 
Also Maya scares me :S

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/460811

Wow, those are all lovely in terms of art as well as design! Kudos! <3

@Rismosh That's some catchy music, love it ! :)

@LordMysterio Gotta love those black & white shapes, you managed to give them character :)

For this project I made everything myself. Tiles, sprites & animations with Clip Studio Paint (note: pixel art for a jam game = never again D:   ) , music and sound effects were me humming in my mic in Windows Recorder.

You can test my entry here and have a laugh: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/461861  ;)

This is my first jam as an artist, i was a bit scared because it's not my usual role, but I think it turned out well!  As I'm not good at drawing, I thought it'd be better to use 3d models and a good toon shader (which I did myself).  I got inspired by games like Zelda the wind waker because it looks amazing. But honestly to do the character I thought of my father who's also called Juan. Also we wanted the character to look cool, we came up with the idea: a surfer astronaut.  This is how it turned out looking:

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462969



Hi April! We usually make 2D games, the one time we made a 3D game was really too much for us, so this time we decided to create a 2D game using pre rendered 3D graphics, inspired by Donkey Kong Country and other games from this era.

Another inspiration was Prince of Persia for DOS, mainly because of the camera angle and "chamber like" style.

We mixed both art styles and applyed to the game theme: A mystic Atlantis like puzzle platformer where you need to switch your only one power crystal to use your 3 abilities.

So here are the examples:

And here is the outcome:

here is the link if you want to play it!

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462457

I'm not really an artist (primarily a game designer) but I have to do everything myself. And while I tried drawing vector graphics, and got decent results, I stick to pixel art as it gives similar results in shorter time. It was especially important during this game jam, as not only I've been working alone, I ended up having to finish my game in less than a day. Which is also why I decided to make player character a slime - slimes and swords are two things that I drew so many times that I could probably do it again with my eyes closed. I use gimp, mostly drawing one pixel at a time, occasionally helping myself with some filters (lately I've been using RGB noise a lot).
An interesting problem that I encountered while working on sprites for my game was the fact that I drew them with black outlines. And since it takes place in space, the background was mostly black too. Not wanting to redraw the sprites without outlines, I changed their color to light gray, which turned out surprisingly well.
You can check it out if you want to: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462343

I also really struggle with walk cycles, so I just made a character who didn't need one haha! For real though, the art in your game was super charming so I think you did a great job! I used a combination of Pixel Edit and the built in sprite editor in Game Maker Studio 2! Worked out really well and was a ton of fun.

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462672#post-867118

For our game, the premise was that a bunch of paparazzi would be fighting over one camera, which is pretty goofy. So I figured a goofy art style was necessary, so I took inspiration from some classic 90s TV shows, particularly Dexter's Lab and Powerpuff Girls.

Used Unity's skeletal animation system. All art made in Photoshop

https://drizzlegames.itch.io/paparazzi-panic

I experimented with some kind of glitch art that has many objects ingame appear as constantly shifting masses or shapes, somewhat inspired by Lucah Born of a Dream and Skelly Selest. Not hand drawn as in Lucah though, instead all art in the game was made from a single sprite (at different sizes and rotations):

That sprite was then used either as building blocks or by using it as a brush in Gimp. The end result looks like this:

The resulting aesthetic was justified ingame by some story bits, explaining that your player character is near dead in a coma. What you see is vague visual information that is feed directly into your brain by your mech computer.

I also made all the vfx and projectiles with this technique.

In previous projects I used a similar effect to create darkness effects, since the engine I'm working with doesn't support true lighting, I find that lead to some interesting visuals and it was great fun to go all out with this for the jam.

In many ways it was easier to create the art this way, since I could just brush down effects and shapes quite quickly. I'm normally work with more conventional pixel art, so not having to care about all the details was quite liberating. I think that freed up a lot of time to be put into gameplay, game feel and additional features.

On the other hand, to keep up the effect, I needed to make multiple frames for all objects, even in situations where they are totally still. That created some additional work overall. I wanted a lot of poses for the player mech, (since the game is all about executing many different actions with a single button). It still only had 8 frames overall I think, but I would have had to draw each one 6 times at least to create glitch animations aren't visibly repeating. Eventually I switched to a skeletal animation for the mech, where limbs and head constantly follow an invisible sketch and animate independently from the actual pose.

The whole thing was quite the learning experience. I like the style a lot and I want to try mixing it more into my regular pixel art for future projects.