Fighting game characters require lots of work. A single character needs around 500-700 frames for it to animate decently well depending on how many attack buttons and specials it has. From my own experience it takes around 3-4 months to get a single one done, and if you are unexperienced it will take a lot more at first since you will make a lot of mistakes you will have to correct later on. And fighting game players expect at the very least eight characters, so you have a lot of work right there without even taking stages into account. There's a reason why there are lots of indie shooting games and platformers but so few beat'em ups and fighters.

The most effective way would be to not use sprites and go for photoshop HD stuff as in Vanillaware games, particularly considering that you say that you don't have experience drawing pixel art. You can save a lot of time using rotation programs and still get decent animation quality with a good workflow. For resolution, I'd say draw at 4K and then resize for lower resolutions. Skullgirls does something like this I believe.

Plan the attacks out before animating them, set the timings, and set the keyframes and inbetweens. With the inbetweens you can get away with rotations a lot, as long as you use keyframes to make the limbs move around in a 3D plane, so you don't end up with silly looking animations like Rumble Fish.

Even with all this, you will need a lot of discipline and endurance to get something like this done by yourself. I started a project like this all by myself two years and a half ago and I still have a long way to go, just to make a demo to crowdfund to get help to speed things up. A project of this kind can take a reeeeally long time for a lone artist. Sugeno did Vanguard Princess all by himself and, while it looks gorgeous, it took him 6+ years to complete it, and he was a pro spriter with years of experience at Capcom.

Here's my take on your latest version, tried to keep your style as much as possible.



EDIT: alternate version, dunno which is better or less worse ha



I think the main thing that needs fixing is that your limbs are a bit too thin. I also think that in that perspective there should be no space between the legs, but maybe someone with better anatomic knowledge can give better advice. I like the sprite, looks cute. Hope this is helpful.

I did a quick edit to implement what you say. Does it look better?

I'll try to fix the hair later.  As for attacks lacking impact, could that be due to the gif's slow playback speed? For some reason the attacks came out slower that they should when opening them with a standard image viewer, yet they play correctly on graphcisgale.

This attack seems to play fine though. Slightly NSFW I guess since there's a not subtle at all pantyshot.

Spoiler
Still a tad rough on details (particularly the katana, and the rotated frames aren't fully cleaned), but I'd like an opinion on the animation. It's supposed to be a jump kick, by the way.

Thanks for the input. While I animate that idle with your tips, here are some animations:

Walk and run. The walk is almost finished, the run is still rough. I don't quite like how the hair animates, maybe I should make the animation more subtle? I referenced Chun's 3S walk and Mai's KOF XIII run for these, although of course these are nowhere near as good as them.





A couple of attacks. The standing slash is almost finished, the crouching one is quite rough, with some recycled bits from the standing attack. The timing is completely off for the gif, you need to open them with Graphicsgale for the real speed.