First off you made some of the same mistakes I did in The tread below this with the run. I did the exact same arm swing mistake! So don't beat yourself up about that.

I am a beginner at this so take my advice with a grain of salt, but if you are also a beginner then my perspective might be helpful as I was probably solving the same problems a few months back.

1. One, you need a vertical body bob timed with the leg drops. One pixel should be enough.

2. Next add a vertical head bob that's one frame behind the body bob. You did both of these of these for the idle animation so just apply them to the run.

3. Based on your fps for the animation pick a consistent pixel length for your limbs to move back and forth. Say the foot moves back four pixels per frame for example. These are for the main movement frames, not the hang frames for the front and back of a leg or arms cycle.

4. The tail is wrong. You have a complete series for both the right and left leg, the tail animation should repeat for each of those so basically twice inside the animation as a whole. The forces acting on it are exactly the same for each leg movement. So for an eight frame animation for instance the tail should repeat after four frames.

5 I like the idle and there isn't much I'd change. You have a lot of muscle movement due to the thick limbs you are using. That's awesome but the transitions between frames are very jerky. Try and smooth those out some.

Thank you for the kind words!

Working on a deer.



With larger animals I have found you can't spitball anatomy as much. This ended up bigger than I wanted so it will probably become a moose. I was going for the European fallow deer. I need to shave two pixels off the height and shorten the length a bit. I like the shape for realism but I will probably stylize it a bit to fit with the other sprites.

In any case I hope that by having the anatomy incorporated from the beginning I can speed up animation.

And the walk cycle. Well, hop cycle for this guy anyway...



And a death. I didn't think it was necessary to do eight direction death animations so there will just be this one for S-->NE, and a mirror for N-->SW.

I like it, especially the crest on the helmet which really conveys movement. In the spirit of providing something construction the sword swooshes seem to linger, how many frames are they maintained for?

Any chance you can post a pixel scaled image for a closer examination?

So I shifted focus a bit so there is something else in world to compare things to perspective wise. Ended up with this guy!