I'm really happy to read that !
I feel you, art was and is to this day my weakest point. I mean of course today I'm finally able to produce something pretty, but there's definitely a long way to go still, I'm way more of a programer than anything else :)
For pixel art I believe that I followed this guy back in the days: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmac3HPrav-9UWt-ahViIZxpyQxJ2wPSH
However there's probably better playlists now, since it was 3 years ago.
For the soul effect, I'm spawning a soul where people die and programaticaly lerping its position towards the shrine according to a curve I setup, nothing really fancy hahaha