Character Walk Animation

Version #1

Using the old design for the character (wider and shorter legged), I made a very simple 6 frame walk cycle which I believed would be able to get me through the entire game. Unfortunately it didn't work out this way at all.

The walk cycle starts off with the character's left leg behind the right leg and the right leg about to fully settle on the floor, this frame is followed by the leg making full contact with little movement from the other leg. For some reason, all of the movement seems to stop on frame 3, this frame has the legs fully planted on the floor before going to what is pretty much frame 1 but with the colours swapped to make it look like it's the other leg. This then goes into another colour swapped copy, this time of frame 2. The final frame of the walk cycle before it repeats is another fully planted frame which is a colour edited copy of frame 3. This walk cycle is honestly not up to standard so I'm going to try to make a new one soon. I will also put the GIF below so you know what it looked like.

Response To Version 1

This response tells me a lot about what I need to change since they went so into depth about it. They liked the angle but pointed out how strange the changing of colours during the walk cycle was as well as how the leg length ought to be changed to better allow bends during the walk and how adding arm movement would be major for making the whole walk cycle more realistic.

The linking of a potential source for a basic walk animation was a great addition to the response, this will help me a lot when it comes to making version 2 of my character walk cycle as I can base the movements such as the passing poses off of it.

Version #2

I changed the design of the character I made to more closely reflect a man walking around at work. The main thing was making the character thinner and taller so that they wouldn't take up as much of the environment, would look more fluid as they walk and would look less chibi. The legs were extended in order to make the bends more natural in the legs during the cycle and I decided to add another frame to make the movement line up with the basic guide I was using as well as having more fluidity.

The first frame is the contact frame where both feet are on the ground but neither fully, this moves onto the down position where the character is about 1 pixel smaller than the starting position, this is to reflect the change to having one leg fully planted and bent, and the other leg being dragged forward. It then moves to frame 3 which is a passing position where the upwards leg crosses behind the planted leg, this increases the height of the character as the leg is less bent and so the character is being pushed up more. At frame 4 the character is at full height as the back leg is pushing them forward, this means that frame 5 becomes normal player height and frame 6 becomes another down position. Frame 7 is another passing position and frame 8 is another up position. This is a really good and smooth walk cycle even though it seems like one leg is the only one going backwards, as this isn't noticable to anyone I had watch it, I'll not waste time changing anything. 

(Sorry for the low export quality, the Asesprite file is opening in the wrong resolution and any higher would crash the site.)

Version #3

The final version (or the most recent version) has arm movement added to ensure the animation moves more smoothly. This was one of the main things Kim (my tutor) told me to add when rating the first version of my walk cycle. As you can see below, the walk cycle has changed a lot, the arms now sway from side to side following the movement of the legs. The movement isn't entirely accurate but it's definitely better for the animation than not having arm movement completely. Apart from the few changes to the arms for movement and swaying, there were a few changes to the positioning of the shoulders to improve what I saw as an issue in the fluidity of the shoulder movement caused by the changing of the arm positions during the swaying motion. The strange angle of the character (chosen for stylistic purposes) make the character really difficult to manage the shoulders and arms of, so I believe I did as well as I possibly could.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I believe that the walk cycle I have made for the character is perfect for my project and doesn't need any further changes, if I make any changes past this point I'll leave a message saying what I did. I really like that I managed to get the arms moving and use the creative criticism of my tutor to improve my walk cycle various times until it looked much better than the initial versions. I have no doubt that without the feedback I got from my tutor I wouldn't have been able to achieve such a good final result, I'll make sure I get as much feedback as possible when it comes to programming work as it's been really helpful.

In the future I will definitely look into getting advice from experienced animators more early, as I wasted a lot of valuable time working on a walk cycle that just wasn't going to work before going to my tutor for support. If I had asked earlier, it's more likely I could have used the time I saved for other parts of production or more finely tuning the intricacies of this walk cycle, both of which the player would probably notice and enjoy.