I’ve been playing about for an evening or so on some ideas I had for making my retro sprites more lively. I was looking at cube world and difference of resolution between characters and environment - started me thinking about animation in my scaled up retro sprites.
Added in some skeletal animation (hacked this up, yep aware of Spine, maybe…)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1668516/shots/anim1.png
Kinda gives a nice effect:
g3fyEo1j0vA
Cheers,
Kev
Cool! Skeletal animation FTW. 
I do enjoy this quite a lot. I was considering doing something like this myself for some upcoming things.
Cool, but have you made separate images, or is it able to detect things like helmet and stuff? Does it also automagically make your images bigger? Looks great, maybe I have to fix something like that too, (in one evening, wthack ur fast)
I cut it into separate pieces - it scales up it self (since it’s needs to maintain the animation scaling).
Here’s the requested comparison thingy:
PXBcZ-K3ZO4
Cheers,
Kev
More video, when you flip the characters round item stay in the right hands - is that a good thing or a bad thing?
A1QjHqbV9sY
It’s a good thing, though most players probably wouldn’t notice if you didn’t take the time to create twice as many animations. Might be a problem on the punch animation (doesn’t reach far enough, jab turns into a cross).
The sword animation looks like it only has 2 keyframes, the start pose and the hit pose. Your animation will look more fluid if you offset the keyframes for different parts. Eg, so the head, body, and sword don’t all stop moving at the same time. The walk cycles look nice!
Cool stuff. The animations are really fluid which gives it a nice style. The “true sides” (made up term) is uncommon and looks good but either way is fine. Like Nate mentioned, the punches and swings look shorter when they are facing left.
Way cool! I can only imagine how you implement skeleton bodies into pixelated sprites…
I love how fluid it looks. No idea why, but it kind of looks like meatboy animation. Don’t ask why, B/c I don’t even know. Best guess is the smoothness.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the feedback folks. I love that we’re talking about the animations - I just put them in the best I could
I’ve just added an option that doesn’t flip an animation when they’re turn, so punch for instance will stay at the back.
I wrote a blog entry about it in case anyone is interested:
http://www.cokeandcode.com/main/sub-pixel-animation-for-retro-sprites/
Cheers,
Kev
this is extremelly cool. When will you share this with us?
How are the animations stored? Is it libgdx based ?
I’m not sure you’d want the source right now 
However, I can push out a demo so you can play if you like. I’m thinking about it as an option for the next “real” game I do.
Animations are stored in XML with just key frames. Characters too, with skins attached. Also some skeleton definition (two at the moment, human and giant).
The editor is Java2D based, the game rendering is all libgdx (love it ;)). The renderer just takes a implementation of SkinRenderer which can render a scaled tile at a position and rotation.
Been playing with adding some NPC type characters ready for a real game:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1668516/shots/anim3.png
That’s meant to be a miner with a torch
Cheers,
Kev
Don’t worry about the demo, I still have to write a game to make use it
I was just curious to see how it works, since I was myself thinking about doing a similar tool (like a Spine Jr.).
Keep up the excelent work!
No, the world only needs one Spine, kthnxbai! 
Kev, give Spine a try! Tweaking animations will be easier with a dopesheet.
Oh but I’m enjoying myself so much!
Kev
No joy for you! There are games to build!
@kevglass
If you haven’t already, you should make it so that people can modify the behavior of attacking, talking, and even add their own such as running, double attacking, etc.
Have been playing a little more:
aJl86Q4y9G0
My fave is the guy with the lantern
Cheers,
Kev
Wow, actually I like that the tools are always on the ‘right’ hand
I think the miner is really cool 
On this most recent 1. The one thing that kinda catches my eye and I wish was slightly differently.
Is the 4-5 people with the full length staves.
When you are walking with a staff that is full body length, you lift it up between walks and not just have it move back and forth(as you would with a shorter object)
should generate a ‘circular’ movement of some sort instead of a clock pendulum swinging back and forth?
tl;dr; 2 guys with long staffs, the staffs need a little up/down movement they don’t currently have? :-X (