Loyalists

[aquileia]

Should I extract the defense frames from your gif? They're missing in the archive.

[Amorphous]

I was planning on giving the defense animation one more pass to clean stuff up (the one frame still doesn't have shading on the sword for example); I'll attach the transparent frames then so you don't have to.

Doofus, Adamant, thanks! That's reassuring to hear.

Hoping to be back soon with more completed animations!

[Amorphous]

Stopping in briefly to post a small update -- keyframes for the standing animation. It'll stop looking like he's sneezing or belly dancing after I add the in-betweens, I swear. In particular, the motion should look a lot more circular than it does right now. I've been using Sleepwalker's pixel wizardry with the dwarves as reference, so I can't go too far astray. (I hope.)

Next time I post, which should be soon, I'm planning on having the defend animation done and this one at least most of the way there. Sorry for the delay!

[aquileia]

Actually, IMHO your previous defense animation looked more natural - I think the main difference is that his right foot slipped 2 pixels back in order to brace for the impact. Great that you're still working on animations, I'm really looking forward to seeing them in game!

[doofus-01]

I think it's the start of a standing animation, aquileia.

Amorphous, maybe it will look better with the rest of the frames, but isn't that a lot of movement, especially for the shield? I figured a lot of the, well, dancing and heaving in other sprites came from the fact they were based on cut & slide, so can't do less than 1 pixel moves. If you are aiming higher, you could probably make more natural and subtle movement.

[aquileia]

Oops - Sorry, I should have read more carefully...

Well, in that case, maybe instead of toning down the shield movement you could replace it with a pure tilt? You already have the rotated versions from the attack animation, and the movement would still be noticeable while carrying less momentum. Reasoning:
If you hold your hand in front of you as if you were holding a shield handle, breathing means that the shoulder of your shield arm will rotate a little. Your hand will only move a tiny bit to the side, but the wrist will rotate a bit with it. Due to its shiny surface, I guess that rotation would be more noticeable to the viewer than the sideways movement.

It's just an idea though, it's your animation, so you can do whatever works for you.

[Amorphous]

Thread necromancy time. Blocking out a clone of the Swordman's attack for the Royal Guard, also doing some minor edits of different versions of the baseframe (#3 being my preferred version so far).

[doofus-01]

There is a partially animated version already in 1.17, but those edits are subtle enough that it shouldn't be an issue to include them. I'm more inclined to tone down the cod-piece, like #1, just because these sprites necessarily have limited bandwidth for what's communicated, and that doesn't seem like the part we want to emphasize.

The attack animation is looking good so far.