Animation is hard.

I used to do 3D animating in blender, but pixel animation is quite different. Nearly every artist in my life recommend I read The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams, so I purchased it and have been reading the chapters and trying to apply each lesson.

It actually immediately explained why the above animation didn’t feel like walking.

There is no weight in the step, there is no transform, the arms are just swapping back and forth. I decided to add a bounce with each step, make the arms swing out.

(also, thank you Blaise for giving me much advice).

For four frames, it works pretty well.

For the side animation, I tried to make the pyromancer’s shoes look curly, and like they were walking with some sass. I decided I’d follow the Animator’s survival kit guide to walking.

However, I had to reduce this to four frames. I decided the most critical frames were contact-left, passing, contact-right, passing-right.

It’s good, but I want more personality. I decided that the curly hat should bounce on the step (and added the arm swings):

All right, too much bounce. It is distracting, especially in-game. Unfortunately, I only shifted it one pixel, and I only have four frames. How can I make it bounce less?

Subpixeling

A dozen youtube tutorials later, the hat bounce is now subpixeled! I’m sure the difference is minor, but when I was deep in the weeds, it felt like I unlocked another deep secret.

I also used subpixeling to make the robe briefly swish back, which was too much as a whole pixel.

Now all the others

I decided to add little bounces to most of the hats, kept the walk and feet mostly the same, but a .gif is worth a thousand words.

I might actually be getting good at this!