Character Idle Animation

The idle animation began with the character just being stood perfectly still and looking to the side as he naturally would be in game. This then goes onto another version of him where his belt shading has changed and his height is bigger, this of course drags his arms up as they don't extend like the legs can. The character then drops back to the lower size during frame 3, this repeats and was achieved through an extra pixel of height from the torso, you can notice the extra line when he goes up as the light shading line extends by an extra pixel on frame 2.

The character getting taller and shorter frame to frame allows the world to feel more alive as the character never really seems to stay perfectly still, improving the realism. Realism is always hard to achieve for pixel games and so getting the user truly invested in the game is difficult too. This meant that I took every opportunity I possibly could to improve how realistic he was. To emphasise the realism and the energy of the scene, I decided to add him blinking on frame 10. The basic frame rate is set at 400 as you can see on the right, so the speed of the idle animation and how often he blinks lines up with what you would expect from real life.