Hello!

My team is designing a platformer game, and I am in charge of the graphics, including their animations and composition. I have worked on various personal projects where I have made platformer characters, however I have let many mistakes slip with them; this time I want to treat my project more responsibly, and to boldly step forward and improve my skills instead of cutting corners when things become hard. This main character needs to turn out particularly well, because, this being a platformer, the character will be in the center of the screen majority of time regardless of other surroundings.

I have only gotten as far as this running animation.


Once I decide to start sculpting the character, I will head towards a style similar to my previous attempt.


I am not under any animation restrictions other than I would like to keep it down to a manageable level. I would like to aim for relatvely generic and fairly natural human animations rather than exaggerated and cartoony. Some of those animations will have to be jump, leap, crouch, several sword slashes, digging, and perhaps edge and wall climbing as well.

But first things first. The running animation started out pretty abyssmal, tho I smarted-up and looked up some running references, and got the current look. I decided to do the most essential animation next, the vertical jump, but my google-fu did not discover any similarly useful references. I mostly found occasional references of a short forward leap, and I cant remember ever making a satisfying jumping sprite or animation yet. At this point, I am clueless as to how to start.