Decided to start working on my own project a few days a week this year rather than doing freelance full time. Essentially it's an RPG party/drinking card game. Because my friends are always roping me into playing tabletop games or drinking games at parties and they all suck so why not make my own that marries the two 

Artwise I'm basically giving myself free rein to draw whatever I feel like on a given day. There will be a couple of levels with different themes (fantasy, sci-fi, angels and demons, a mixture of any or all of those/whatever doesn't fit.) Doing player characters and enemies at 64x64. Might consider doing bosses and items at higher and lower resolutions respectively but I will need to mock up some card layouts to figure out how much space I'll have available. Essentially with the artwork I'm trying to capture the feeling of old school rpg sprites where everything kind of looks special, think 2d Final Fantasy games. So lots of colours and smoothness.

Critique is appreciated but I can't guarantee I'll update anything, I have a lot of drawings to do so I probably won't be going back to do major changes unless something really strikes a chord. General thoughts on the overall art direction early on would be great while I can still go back and make changes to everything.

Anyway I'll just be updating this thread as I go. Trying to have a good diversity of gender/race/bodytype etc. Honestly they'll probably be mostly bottom heavy women though . Have a small backlog already so here are those.


Player: Thief


Player: Mystic Defender


Player: Warrior


Player: Brawler


Enemy: Mechsuit Seraph


Enemy: Ice Goddess


Enemy: Wood Goblin

_{(I realise I've already used that arm pose 3 times I'll stop I promise)}

This is a thread for us to develop a bit of a beginners guide to animation. I'd like for it to be more like a general knowledge bank than a tutorial as such. Though some tutorial components to go along might be nice, like some basic "how to set up and animate in GraphicsGale/ProMotion/Photoshop" type things.

Since we don't really have anything like this for pixel art techniques I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing the mods would want to keep around as a sticky but it would at least be nice to have all the basics in one pixel centric thread for people to link beginners to. My experience is that I'm fresh out of Uni with a bachelors in animation so there's plenty I don't know and heaps of room for me to be wrong so I'll need some help from the community.

So far I'm thinking the layout will be:

What is animation and how does it work?
   In this section I'll go over the basics of how we see animation through persistance of vision and some basic concepts like what frames are and frame rates etc.


Am I ready to animate?
   This will basically just be a brief run down to say that solid drawing skills will make animating a lot easier and that it's a dedicated craft with it's own unique set of problems so it's probably not the place to start learning art.


Basic principles of animation.
   This is the most important section where I'll go through the basic principles of animation, each section will have some visual aids as well as an analysis of at least one game asset demonstrating the principle in use. The sub-headings for this so far are:
      The physics of animation
      Basic movement
      Timing
      Ease in and ease out
      Anticipation and overshoot
      Arcs
      Follow through and overlapping action
      Stretch and squash


Cycles.
   Here I'll talk about cycling animation and give some examples of common cycles with game art examples. Below are the ones I can think of that are important but suggestions are welcome.
      Wheel Cycle
      Ball Bounce
      Pendulum
      Wave
      Dissipation (ripples/smoke etc.)
      Cats tail


Animating a character.
   Talking about the most important aspects of character animation. Haven't got a completely solid idea of how I'll approach this but something like:
      Character
      Weight
      Anatomy
      etc.


Techniques for developing an animation from scratch.
   I will go through the basics of building an animation.
      Key frames vs. straight ahead
      Key frames, Breakdowns and Inbetweens
      Referencing and acting it out
      Thumbnails
      Creating an animation roadmap (timing charts, arcs etc.)
      Putting it together (some info about frame management, onion skinning and scrubbing etc. here)

Things to be aware of when animating for a game.
   This will be particular pitfalls that come up when translating traditional animation techniques to games. How to make responsive feeling animation would be the primary subject to focus on I think. I'll need help with this cause I haven't got a whole lot of actual game development experience. As Cyangmou suggested we could probably use some words on what the workload is like when you've got animation in the mix and maybe suggestions for realistic movesets for a first game.

How to animate a...
   An analysis of some common video game animations.
      Walk
      Run
      Jump
      Attack


Advanced techniques.
   Self explanatory. Just a couple I can think of off the top of my head:
      Smears
      Multiples
      Subpixel animation


What software is available.
   Quick run down of the available pixel art animation software and their strengths and weaknesses. I'll need a hand with this one from people familiar with software other than GraphicsGale.


Tips and tricks
   Any other tidbits that don't fit into the main text.

Further reading
   Where we post links to as many animation resources as we can find.


I'll try to write up the bulk of it and draw the examples myself but if there's a topic you'd like to write about in particular any assistance would be greatly appreciated. I'll try to chip away at this over the next couple of weeks when I've got the energy. If you've got any suggestions for subjects to write on I'd like to hear them.

I'm hoping from this thread mostly to be discussion on the relevant techniques and to get feedback on what I've written, either from people who know animation and think I'm wrong or can expand on what I'm saying, or from people who are new to animation and can tell me what you found most helpful, what is clear, what is unclear, what subjects you'd like to know more about etc. I'd like the keep the language as clear and basic as possible and condense this as much as is reasonable so it's not a slog for people to read through. I'm not exactly the best at this so general editing help is encouraged.

I'd also love it if people could post good examples of pixel art animation from games or of their own that they think demonstrate a particular aspect of animation, I have some animations of my own to contribute but probably not enough to fill out a whole guide. Also links to online resources or books about animation for the further reading section would be great.

I expect any assistance people provide in this thread to be available for me to use verbatim so if you'd rather I didn't do that with anything you post just let me know. We'll link back to this thread in the finished edition so people can see the discussion behind it and who exactly contributed what.

I wonder if anyone knows if there is or is a way to set up a short cut to switch to the next/previous brush in GraphicsGale? I had a look but I couldn't find one. That and getting the zoom, move and eyedropper tools to only activate while the button is pressed are the features I miss most from working in photoshop I think. Suppose I could look into setting up macros, never done that with an external program before though, any suggestions?

I'm working with a friend on a small game project. I'll be drawing backgrounds and upper body portraits for a bunch of enemies and NPC's and such.



Very wip still but I think It's ready for some critique. I still need to work out some kinks with the anatomy blend, particularly on the left side.

Also I wonder if anyone could point me in the direction of games with nice background art to study.