Hand-drawn Art

I have experimented with different ways of creating hand-drawn animations in 2D.

Looking Grimm

The style for this game involves redrawing everything frame by frame. It is a time-consuming process, which is why the character designs in this game are relatively simple. I like this style because it has a charming homemade feel. For more complex designs, it might not do as well. What you see before you aren't necessarily walk cycles, although some work as such. This just features all the necessary frames to create the walk animations for these characters.

Here are some of the animations in action:

The intro animation to the game showcases a lot of these in action. Beyond the sprite frames, all the movements seen here are built entirely in the GDevelop engine.

For still characters, I like to make a two frame boiling animation to make them feel more alive. This is seen in the tavern area.

Battle Run

In my first project where I really tried to make animations, I made moving elements on a separate layer. These are each one sprite in the engine, although it may be worth trying to make these separate sprites in a future game. This style makes the sprite frames more consistent, but the movements look very stiff. This effect may be fixable through tweens.