After I put together all of my poses, Stina volunteered to throw them together into a gif animation on photoshop. It took a long time and a lot of lacking motivation in order to throw together the poses for the animation, though it came out fairly well. However, I was intimidated by the notion of trying to animate a run or a jump for the same kind of anatomy, and was worried about the time it would take me to do so. I felt like animating a walk alone wouldn't be enough, as I wanted our game to be fairly explorable, in order to give Stina enough room to show off her own artwork. With a walk, I felt like we would be restricted to a single flat plane to explore.
Having been doing a little more study into 2D platformers, I noticed that many of these platformers used a 3/4 view of sorts, or at least had both legs visible. I wanted to incorporate this, as my current profile animation felt very stiff and stunted. I began another redesign, basing it on one of the most simple shapes possible - a sphere. I returned to my seed studies, and found one in this:
I took some of the features of my design, and placed them upon this new base.
A circle was incredibly easy to animate in various poses, and I quickly came up with the idea of having the creature move in a roll to dash, in order to get into practice with the concept of animating something a little more.
And with Stina's handy photoshop skills to preview:
While Stencyl takes each individual image to make into a gif on its own, I felt it was really good to be able to see what each animation will look like without the fuss of importing into the engine and fiddling with file sizes. With the body of my creature now so simple, I could focus on the little things with less worry, such as the physics of weight on the creature's feet and its sprouting shoots. Stina also refrained from doing any between frame tweening, so the animation above should be the same as it is within the engine. Satisfied, I began cleaning up my lineart and adding further details like wind motion:
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