During the past three weeks of our ten week project, I took up the work to animate the main character of our game. I thought this would be good practice since I’ve been animating some before in Adobe flash, although nothing more complicated than stick figures.The previous experience in animating movement did help. But this time I needed not to animate a straw-thin character, I had to animate a body with some actual mass. I started off with animating the movements with stick figures, as I am most comfortable with it and in the end I actually got a few rough running animations. This however, proved to be more difficult as the style of running i made did not fit into the concept of the character, which is a gloomy and lost soul. And the animations which i had done all had happy skipping looking running.
This is when I started to think that this animation work would be really difficult, yet really fun. From this point on I started on making the animations with a body instead of sticks. This all went well, and I learned a lot of new things working with it even if the animations still had happy sprinting or just dull walking.
The animation with bodies was problematic, since our character is slightly facing the camera in game much like Castle Crashers. And I had no idea how to make a character from such a perspective, I was completely clueless. About ten different versions later I remembered what we had learned i n our previous 2D course. Boxes. By making a box with legs running, I could see how to make the animations look like I wanted.
With this I could now start trying to make a proper character running. And after a few tries I actually managed to create something resembling our main character somewhat running.
After my first finished rough, I started fiddling around trying to make it look better and smoother. This however did not work out as I got stuck on one thing and didn’t get any further at all. My group mate, Christoffer told me to try making only rough sketches instead of trying with clean lines. I tried and it worked wonders! I managed to make a proper walk cycle that i could give to Christoffer for the cleanup.
All in all my work with this animation was really fun and I learned a lot even though it was really difficult. And the next time I’ll animate it will be a lot smoother. Artifact Done!
Reactorpanda 
First off I’m going to say that it’s a really good post! You’ve used graphics well to explain your work process and it’s really fun and inspiring to see the different stages you went through with your animation. You can really see the improvement that you’ve made!
I think it was a really good idea to animate a box to solve the difficult perspective problem. Getting lost in detail or making too complicated drawings/frames can make animation really difficult, but keeping it simple makes it easier to focus on the most important thing, which is (believable) movement.
Walk animations/cycles (or running for that matter) are really one of the most difficult things to accomplish in animation, but you’ve done it well. I recommend checking out Richard Williams “Animator’s Survival Kit” if you haven’t done that already. It has some really good insights on walk cycles and animation in general, and lots of great examples on different character walks. It’s a very useful and inspirational book when you need to come up with a walk, especially if it has to mirror the character’s personality.
But other than that, I don’t have anything else to add or say. I think you’ve done a good and clear post that shows and describes your work process in detail.
You’ve also analyzed what you’ve done and why some of your early animations didn’t work because of the character personality, and I think that’s really good. Evaluating your work is an important process when you aim to get better at something, and as a reader it’s interesting to see what kind of problems you encountered and how you solved them.
It would have been fun to see one of your stick figure animation tests since you mentioned them, but it’s no big deal really. It’s basically the only thing that I could think of that could be seen as “missing” in this post…
Well done, and good luck with the project!