A lack of animation worries

[Skunk]

I am sorry, I may have missread your original post.
What I should have said is, it will be lots of work, the only way to tell if its worth it really, is if you are satisfied with the end result.


I tried ONCE to make my own graphics, I learned really really fast that I am a musician, not an artist lol.


Sorry again if i seemed condescending, I honestly thought you were looking forsomeone to explain step by step what to do, and you'd then decide if you went that rout.

 

[Slimsy Platypus]

If you are solely after idle enemy image animations there are lots of ways to address that, both as macro aproaches such as "breathing effects" (Yanfly's) that are applied to all enemies or slternatively an independent "per battler" approach.  This can be insane amounts of work or very minimal depending on your process.  Minimally, animating a rat's tail swinging or similar effects can all be done very pretty quickly if you are creating the assets yourself.  Alternatively, if you build your enemies using animation software (spriter etc.) then touch up as necessary, that is still manageable time-wise for one person.  The time it takes to draw three frames for each sprite: nobody can know that but you, because it's going to vary based on your style and ability.


I will say, having static enemies will always feel very "retro".  If that's what you're going for and your game isn't battle centric maybe that's fine.  But if battle is a key focus of your game it probably will feel very "cheap" to the player (most game players don't know what it takes to make a game, only what the end product looks and feels like).

 

[Feenick]

Going the whole rotating limbs method is alright, but it does seem like the sort of thing that you'd need to be really careful about, since I've seen a good few examples of that method of animation used end up with something that's outright unpleasant to look at. I feel that SMT: Strange Journey and the Gen V pokemon game pulled off the 'animated sprites derived from still images' fairly well, but given how relatively small those sprites are they can get away with things that would be offputting on larger ones [and even then, both those games had to add in a ton of extra pieces to deal with cases where warping/distortion/rotation wouldn't work at all].


Those sorts of tools do make animation a lot easier, sure, but you have to make sure the end product doesn't end up looking worse in the end.

 

[cekobico]

It does need careful touch, which is why this kind of approach could never replace the quality of the work done by animators who do frame-by-frame manually. I'd go as far as saying even 3D animations wouldn't compare to 2D animations drawn by hand xD look at the first two seasons of Sailor Moon Crystal lol