Hey, no worries, your prompt response and breaking down of my posts are proof enough that you listen, I CAN tell you're trying to be as responsive as posible and this is a great back & forth.
WIP is for work in progress =) I'm pretty sure this term is widespread in any art C&C comunity...I'm pretty sure.
Oh, I thought because you had animated flash you DID have some animation principles. That is why I used the term "ease-in" =).
Ease-in Ease out/ or slow-in slow out
is one of the 12 "animation principles" put forth by the big wigs at Disney, you can make a search for "12 animation principles" on google if you want. They arent as much of an animator's commandment as they were made out to be by Disney, but they're common knowledge among animators so I thought I'd refference it.
6. SLOW-OUT AND SLOW-IN
As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.
This is what I think you miss the most in your animation, there is a lack of rythm to it and in an action this short it can only be because of lack of "ease-in". This is mostly the case with the beggining of the animation, not so much with the part where he's got his two hands on the machinegun.
I can understand that you want the attack motion to communicate force, but...think again of your favorite animes which inspired this sprite (or the way jack bauer or whoever goes into shooting stance), it's more important to make the character lean into the action with a good pose that follows an action line, than it is to make him arbitrarily raise his leg while he stands fully upright. Dont take out the part where he raises his leg if you want, but make his whole body language have more energy rather than focusing on strong actions in a single part of his body.
Oh, that's great that you're being aware of balancing your motions even from the get go......but, there are more ways than raising limbs to keep the balance line sensible...
There is one thing about the raising leg too, and it is that your "intro" to the shooting pose is reversed to be exactly the same as the "outro", and the raised leg makes a much less sense as he goes out of the shooting stance, than it does when he goes into the shooting stance.
This dillema is something that you encounter often in sprite animations (and pretty much anything pixelart, really), it is the eternal balancing act between uniqueness and recognizable patterns.
Everything must be artistic, unique and good looking; but at the same time it has got to be bland enough that it doesnt make you aware that there's a pattern involved and pretty much everything you see has it all has been repeaded over and over again.
The answer most of the time, is to take out the single elements that call too much attention to themselves, and instead try to work a harmony into the piece that makes the whole reflect whatever your intention was. In your case I suggest toning down that forcefullness in your beloved leg movement (I can see the <3 , the ankle movement is lovingly detailed....sorry! that's how it is sometimes) and try to suggest that forcefullness with a big load of ease-in/ease-out.
Llook at doppleganger's "excessively tiled fun fest"(I'm paraphrasing here) topic for some fine examples of this harmony over flamboyant features aproach in tiling :p
My bad about the turn based thing, I instantly asumed it was some kind of Beat-emup or ISO-Platformer (hopeful thinking from my part :p I love them).
I can tell you didnt really understand my point about scroll-to animate....I'll try
to show you what I mean with an edit soon.
PS: if you want to work on animation, here's a blog with some good excersises
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/Cartoon%20CollegeEDIT: ok, I made a rough n dirty edit and it showed me a few things-
Is there some limitation in the enginge that forces you to absoluteley keep the character centred in the middle of the grid at all times? this seriously demerits the animation
This is my edit.
This is my edit with some proper anchoring
(geez timing looks horrible in the browser for me, please open it in a gif editing software lest you think I mean for it to look that bad O_o)
See the difference? much of that forcefullness could simply come from actually showing him stepping in, instead of making him go trough the motions in while fixed in position.
Having the robot step in to shoot is fine, what isnt is that you give so much focus to him just standing straight while he raises the knee, if you want to give importance to the fact that he raised his leg and make it forceful, then animate the moment where he stomps with force.
Regardless, to the whole animation the act of him stepping forward is much more important than him raising a leg I think you might have missed this because you're animating it as if he was in a fixed position so you didnt realize just how much this character was really moving. Do you absolutely MUST start by animating in ISO AND with such a detailed character AND with the character fixed in a position AND doing this puppet style of animation? it is a pretty bad way to go if you're not confident of your animation skills.....regardless of how obviously good a sense of space you have.
if I was you I'd start with a simple character in side view, and animate him by drawing almost every frame...maybe doing the ease-in/ease-outs by selectively scrolling some of his limbs. ISO because of the somewhat top-down tends to force you to draw confusing sillouethes if you are not too experienced.
I told you that there were other ways to balance when you raise a leg, I chose to do it by making him shift the weight of his upper body a little early in the animation, I think it works.
see how I made the robot STILL raise his gun but it doesnt look awkward? if I was making the animation on my own I probably wouldnt have done it, but knowing you'd be resistant to my advice if I just took out a bunch of your elements and just did my thing with your stuff, I decided to work it in. The important thing about the machine gun now is that the way it moves follows an action line, (which is a line that is traced by keeping track of the movement of a single element troughout the animation...for example the tip of the machinegun) not only that, but I also went out of the way by putting a bunch of frames before he shot showing the machinegun rotating into place, almost drawing the line of action with the machinegun.
Look at the way he makes the step, the foot is changed if only so slightly in the first frame where he's actually made the step, I did this by dragging sections of the foot either backwards or upwards, this is a good looking example of what I meant when I suggested you scrolled things partially. I did this to the torso and the legs too but I left the evidence of it there, so you had an idea of how I did it.
I just went a little wacky with the firing part, much of what I did is incorrect but if you look at the movement it isnt strange, I just meant to show you that being a little erratic and scrolling things selectively doesnt look as bad in pixelart as it would in other medium because of the very pixelly nature of the medium.
EDIT: this is obviously a rough edit, and seeing it with far slower timing made me realize the frames dont really show very well the concept of ease-in/ease out...I had to re-edit the one with modified anchoring just to make this be barely related to the concept of ease-in/ease-out at all, but hopefully the message gets trough.