Chest animation and character reaction for mobile game

Brief: develop a set of animations for a mobile game.
Subject: a dwarf reacts to a chest opening at the end of a level, with different outcomes.

INTRO
I challenged myself to create an entire scene from scratch.
I reconstructed the original flat illustrations for chest and dwarf into isolated layers to use as sprites, then I proceeded to rig each component with the final animations in mind.

ANIMATIONS
The animations were set up to be split in sections (i.e. for the Chest: idle, squeeze, open "happy" and open "disappointed") and then blocked out with the main poses, then progressively edited to get the final result.
The included VFX are mainly bursts.

VFX
I made all the VFX in the scene, including the "Chest Glow" for which I made a custom shape and the Coin Explosion with an individually painted 4x4 spritesheet. These are a mix of bursts and looping effects.
For the glowing light rays from the chest and in the background I simply used stretched particles.

I eventually added a drop shadow, animated in the case of the chest to simulate a change in ambient occlusion during the jump.