To see the animations for this, look here.

These assets are now more than a half a year old, except some polishing and a bit editing I did about 1-2 months ago.
The mockups were done with assets I did for a project, a Touhou fan work featuring Marisa Kirisame in a Platformer game (no, there aren't enough).
Basically it started (for me at least) with a discussion about pixel art vs the "retro art" excuse for bad graphics in an anonymous collaboration thread. That motivated me to test my own abilities and I did a mockup which I posted a thread after the one with the discussion. Since the initial discussion wasn't continuing I didn't wrote anything to it. I got surprisingly positive feedback and suddenly someone decided to make it into a game with unity. From there it went surprisingly good (except that the interest in collaboration from others, apart the programmer and myself, died with the first thread). It went on until the collaboration threads died, despise not following any "project management" rules (I think it helped greatly that the programmer seemed to had a similar mindset concerning the project and generally seemed to be a cool guy and I'm a bit sad I don't have his contact).
It was much fun for me (and I hope for him and others, too) and I learned a lot during that time (most notable, my first real animations and actually my first serious sprites from that perspective). While I'm reluctant to call the project dead, the collaboration threads died down and with them my way to contact the programmer. So it's unlikely that this will get finished.
It was a very interesting and fun doing assets, thinking about how they will be implemented only to see them being used completely differently.
It was also a great experience seeing my own sprite reacting to keyboard input, walking over my tiles and getting shot down by my other sprites (sadly, not by my bullets).