Player Character Animations

[Shipright]

Greetings! I am trying to finalize my player character by making sure the basic animations work. I have found myself having to increase the resolution of the base sprite to get the game details I want and thus have had to up my animation game to work with larger and more complicated sprites. Here is the evolution of my player character:



And here is the first walk animation I made any my attempt at replicating it with the more detailed sprite:

and...

The new one seems a bit choppy for me and I think it might be the head bob. I wanted to give some upper body movement but swinging arms and bobbing chest both didn't work out so I went with the head and arms moving up and down a bit. Should I lose it?

Sorry for the change in image size/style, I recently switched from Aesprite to PyxelEdit. Any thoughts and critiques appreciated. I want to get this one down before moving on to the other directions.

[Shipright]

So I went ahead and played with the run animation as well. I feel this still looks rough. There is a lot of overlap of limbs and body here and I am only playing with a two color sprite presently so I color coded the limbs to make tracking the movements easier. Again here is old and new side by side:

and...

Again any thoughts would be helpful, I am brand new to this!

[pistachio]

1st thought:



Crits:
The run is as slow as the walk, almost feels like it's on the moon. Cut out 2 frames or increase the FPS to fix that.
Arms could swing further back unless you were going for foreshortened movement (which reads pretty wonky flatshaded and at low res).

Aside from this basically all it needs is some shoulder and hip rotation to get rid of the superbros-like flatness. Depends how you want to evolve this.

[Shipright]

Thanks for the input Pistachio!

So here are it is again after some feedback modifications:



I added rotation to both left and right shoulder in sync with the arms, and added horizontal movement to the collar bones. I think when combined with the chest bounce it suggests athletic movement pretty well. I also extended the right arm back a pixel to exaggerate that movement just a bit. And no more moon walking, the frame rate has been sped up to 80fps from the 120 of the walk animation.

I am having some trouble with the hip rotation. I see why it needs to be there and agree wholeheartedly but I have tried a few variations and nothing satisfies me thus far. Does anyone have any advise on how to approach this?

Also for context this is for a ARPG isometric type dungeon crawler. This was originally intended to be one of four directions covering down/down right/right but I am leaning towards the full eight orientations now so this would be down right.

[Shipright]

Hey guys! I got some work done over the weekend.

First off so I had some context on what the other directions would look like I went ahead and defined the stand positions in all eight directions. I can tell there is something off on on the Left Up/Down and Right Up/Down positions. I can't quite put my finger on it but I think it has to do with the arms and arm gaps. I am also not quite happy with the Left and Right poses. I tried to rotate them as far as I could without them becoming too skinny. Also with just the two colors its hard to define the arms against the body. Of course I could add a color...



And from there I started on some of the other direction walk animations.

   

I am sure these are far from perfect. As always any comments are greatly appreciated.

[Shipright]

New and improved walk and run animations. I incorporated hip movement into added appropriately scaled (I hope) feet to both. On the walk the arms now swing and there were some minor changes to the legs. I think I am headed in the right direction, please let me know!

   

[Gil]

No one walks with their feet so far spread apart, as in the down/up walking animations.

[Shipright]

I agree, thanks for the feedback. Its hard to see some of the obvious when you have been staring at the same pixels all night. Below is a slight modification with each leg moved one pixel for a 40% reduction in separation. I tried to go another pixel but that narrowed the hips the sprite looked feminine. I will remember that if/when I get around to a female graphic.

   

Better?

[Shipright]

The latest and greatest. If there are no serious errors pointed out I say I finally have an entire animation series complete!



Thoughts?

[Gil]

That seems about right yeah. There's a million more things you could change of course, but that looks solid enough to me.