Your degree's in game dev, eh? Nice. That'll make coding slightly easier. At least, I'd hope it would. Don't know what kinda game dev degree you'd have if you somehow get through the entire thing without knowing how to start up a small program in Java or C or whatever mainstream language.
I've got a degree in Computer Science, so we *might* have the coding portion out of the way. And really, you will ALWAYS want to use a framework/engine if you're making a game. You only make a game engine if you intend to make a game engine. I'm pretty certain you don't want to be up to your armpits in segfaults from rendering graphs, transforms, memory management, etc.
Regarding the sprite, you'll want to turn off Anti-aliasing in ANY part of Photoshop you find it in. Preferences, Pencil tool, Pen, whatever. In a .gif that supports transparency, Anti-Aliasing causes a thin edge of white-ish pixels around the edge of Chichi that you'll notice if you have the animation placed over a dark background. It also looks as if it was scaled down from a larger version; the edges seem a bit less crisp than what they started as.
Might I recommend checking out some of the links here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comm..._posts_for_2d/
I'm especially fond of ASEsprite for animation. You can both preview the animation and save it as a sprite sheet.