I've never "studied" any of the game stuff I work on either, much though I would like to. My local college's only computer class is geared toward seniors learning to turn on their computers properly, and I lack the resources for the online programs I've drooled over for years now. So everything I know is self taught or came through tutorials. Video tutorials in particular, as I often have difficulty with written code tutorials. Try taking a look at Heartbeast's instruction videos (linked from my last post) and see if you can glean anything from them. He's one of my go-to mentors at gamemaker code and also does pixel art how-to videos on that channel. He is presently working on a course for making rpgs (such as zelda, pokemon, or countless other titles) which is expected to come out in december, and I'm super excited to see it. If you like his style of video tutorials,
Shaun Spalding is another great coding resource.
What program do you use for your pixel art? If it's just the pixel editor built into gamemaker, I can see why you'd have issues animating stuff. Gamemaker's sprite editor is like the notepad of pixel art. PyxelEdit is cheap (free if you are just after tiling aids) and has a number of features to help you see animations on the go, plus the tools to help you build nice looking tile sets. Photoshop has similar features for animations I believe, but it is well outside my price range. You might also look into
piskel, a free online pixel editor, which has added drawing features such as basic shapes and a live preview to view your animations at scale while you work.
Another question, have you ever experimented with vector art? It's a very different process than pixel drawing, but
inkscape is my program of choice for building my art (and completely free). It takes time to get used to inkscape, but can be worthwhile. Compare the pixel art from my last post, which is supposed to be a ninja, with this piece done in inkscape:
Spoiler (click to show/hide):
The only pieces of this screen design that were not done in inkscape are the man behind the sign and the profile images of the monsters (I clipped those out of a full body concept image done for the same project that the screen is built for)
When it comes to character design I am much less practiced, and typically trace over other people's drawings. Like this:
Spoiler (click to show/hide):
The results come out very nice, but I have to rely on others to do the initial sketching. But I have done some experiments with animating characters that others have created, both in inkscape and in spriter, with fairly decent results. So if you're interested in new methods to try out, I may be able to help you there. Just don't come to me for help figuring out how to sketch something, because the best I can really do is direct you to google images for a reference. I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I need to work with a character artist from now on.
If you're interested, I may have a few small gamemaker projects lying around which could use a pixel artist's touch, and you can see the kind of code I work with. They wouldn't be porn (I have personal issues with pixel porn anyhow), but they might be a chance to stretch your legs and I would answer any questions I could about how they were coded. I could also give you my take on game design and world building, which is limited but is something I've been working on for about twenty years now (honest. A couple years ago I had to finally throw away the last traces of a tabletop rpg game I started when I was eight or nine because my mother wouldn't let me play DnD at that age). World building is probably my very best skill to date. I can take a simple concept and expand it into a rather large and somewhat detailed world in a couple of weeks (unless I'm turning to a team to approve every aspect; that slows it down some), and over time can continue to build on that framework until I have hundreds of regions, thousands of years of history, and dozens of variations on common implements. If the game calls for that level of detail, anyway. Most games these days only take the couple of weeks for relevant details. Compared to world building, my coding skills are a joke. I'm still studying the uses of json. But I did manage a simple physics script for a swinging rope for a ninja game, which is one of those projects I could bring you in to help with.
I'm not mad. I'm only forty and eighty percent crazy, and that's split between two personalities, which makes me almost half sane.