animation! Let me start by saying this sprite looks cool. very nice. His size and variety of color areas make him a bit of work to animate. Not saying he needs to be simplified. But realize the more you stuff in little areas the more time consuming he will be to work with, without it looking too flat or boiling.
First thing to do is break him into layers. It looks like you did this but I might have chosen different layers than you so check em out. shown in stacking order
Next I made a very small edit. I tried to keep exactly what you had and just work with it but I made 3 changes.
1. moved his front arm one pixel to the left. It seemed very close to his body and when I would animate back to it he would look a little crunched.
2. made his cape come all the way up. so you can see it between his arm and his body. this doesnt really help his form in any way and could be a mistake. but its what i decided to do.
3. used the light red on the cape to define his arm. a brighter red would have worked better but i didnt want to add any colors.
Now to animate. So youve got the right idea. this thing is so small that shifting his body one pixel makes a huge difference right? so what to do?
Mostly we are looking to animate in a way that shows volume. Even though hes just a little 2d guy if we hint at the fact that he lives in some sort of volumetric area it will look interesting.
1.animate color- there are colors inside of a character that define props. they might not have lines, because they either ARE lines, areas, or dots. you can move these colors around to show volume.
2.animate lighting- there are colors that define lighting or texture. push around the balance of light and shadow to show volume. honestly this is the same thing as animating color. they are just colors.
3.animate volume- expand areas of color to show them deforming. this is like scaling. the color area keeps its position but its perimeter expands.
4.animate position- Move an entire obj of colors in a direction. this is what you had going on before. the smaller the character the more animating position changes things. 1 pix shift like you stated can appear to be a lot.
Mix the above 4 to show volume in animation. As you draw even though your character is a flat 2d sprite attempt to draw visual cues that show he exists within a 3d area like we are looking at him thru a camera.
The animation I did took a bit of time. about 1 1/2 hours in all. but the 1 1/2 hours wasnt spent purely on drawing "that". It took the process time, making decisions, trying different things, cleaning specific areas etc. In all honesty my animation has a lot of mistakes and could be improved greatly but it is heading in the direction that i wanted. Every step is a tool to get to the final product. be patient, try things out, make multiple versions and compare them. As an "animator" type of person I tend to use alot less detail than others, just so I can get to animation more quickly and have more room to push colors around:
http://kirkbarnett.blogspot.com/ But don't compromise your style. its totally animate-able. Just more expensive if you want it to look volumetric. Lastly, i think your animation is fine. If I played a game with this guy and he had the idle you gave him it wouldn't ruin the gameplay experience for me. Low production values get things done faster and sometimes thats really important. But if you want to do more, go for it! animation is super fun!
stupid question: does anyone know the proper syntax for posting a SWF here? was unable to get it to work.
