It's nothing fancy but the latest ones I've learned how to do are explosions from something being destroyed. It's basically done by creating different objects at different spots on the target getting desroyed, and then having events that compare those 'effects' objects and their animation frame numbers to certain frames and increasing the scale of the object by +1 until they're gone.
Here's a trailer that shows some explosions I made this way in ODW. The trick is to alternate the animation frames' colors a bit with red / orange / yellow & etc.
Oh another easy one is the screen shake. For that you can make an invisible active object that's set to a quick looping path in the center of your frame. Make it so that it does NOT follow the frame, so it's always about in the same spot.
Then when you need a screen shake you can just disable your normal camera and set the X/Y view to the hotspot on that invisible, fast-moving active object for a couple seconds or so. This will give the appearance of the whole thing going crazy shakey shakey.
The one thing you need to do for this though in order to get it to work is to make sure the whole frame is larger than the visible gameplay area. For example in a couple of my recent games that use this I've had to change a frame that would've normally been 320 x 200 to 330 x 205 (while still having the visible area set to 320 x 200) to accomdate any possible screen shakes from either explosion / critical hits or whichever.
Edited by Del Duio
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Alpha channels are the key to making flashy effects - unless your graphics are pixelart-based, in which case the two don't really mix.
In my current project (kibnd of a hybrid of M.U.L.E. / Scorched Earth / Master of Orion), I have various sunlight effects.
It's partly for show, but also an important aspect of the gameplay - solar energy is a valuable commodity, and is only produced during daylight (the planets rotate both around the sun, and about their own axis).
(it looks better in motion)
Unfortunately, even in HWA, the framerate is starting to suffer quite a lot...
On further inspection, it seems that the slowdown is caused by a fastloop, and not the graphics - which is kind of a relief, but does leave me with a whole new set of problems to sort out...
While I agree that you shouldn't use fastloops unless you have to, in this case it's unavoidable.
I can probably fix it so only some of the loops run each frame though. I hate optimizing code
After even more testing, it turns out that it's not the fastloops at all (or at least not much).
The main problem is actually the collision detection - fine collision detection on large, rotated actives seems to be incredibly slow.
Since all my objects are circles anyway, I'm going to try and use a distance calculation instead, and see if that's any quicker.
You could put some video of girls flashing their chests or some seizure inducing flashes of bright colors out of nowhere.
Those both would make your games much more "flashy"
I guess you could always do the DragonBall Z anime sorta thing ... you know, with those action lines in the background.
Try using arcs of light for swinging swords and fire from guns as they shoot?
A shining glint of light in the enemies eyes' just before they perform a special attack is always neat.
Dust cloud puffs made when the hero runs or jumps or lands.
Explosions are commonly used to make a game seem "flashy"
If you could figure it out within the confines of 2d, or find a nice method for 3d code, then stuff like damage done based upon parts of the enemy would be kewl to see ... shoot a zombie in the shoulder and it tears apart an' hangs by the skin dangling, or falls completely off, or shoot his leg/legs off and the zombie falls to the ground and uses his arms to crawl toward you ... but that sorta thing is way over my head to code currently. It sure would seem "flashy" to me though.
Blood of the Ancient One, Seen only as Shadow, Faster than Lightning, Fierce as the Greatest Dragon, Nearly Invisible, Floating in a Dream, Entered through the Demon Door, Destroyer of Evil in a Realm with a Red Sky Scarred, Who could I be ?
I even uploaded an MFA of the effect on one of my project's updates, although I don't expect everyone to have checked it out. It's not a proper tutorial or anything so I apologise in advance for the mess.
Originally Posted by Sketchy While I agree that you shouldn't use fastloops unless you have to, in this case it's unavoidable.
I can probably fix it so only some of the loops run each frame though. I hate optimizing code
Might not be your problem, but it should help boost some speed.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
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Edited by Del Duio
Now I just need to get room in my budget to order MMF2 so I can continue working on my stuff 
