Cool. Can you elaborate on the kinds of animations a project like yours would need? It will help me to have a note about it so that I can focus my efforts when I start adding things. I may even get going sooner instead of later, pushed on by your interest haha.
Viewing post in Nine Realms Midgard Village Characters comments
I'm afraid to ask for much, because I know it's not that simple thing, but adding an animation with his hands up for standing and running (as you carrying something) and a "swing" as if with an axe/pick would be very helpful. The first animation probably speaks for itself, while in the case of the second one you could add a hoe/sword/axe/pick and other "swinging" tools with ease.
I hear you. You’d basically like a way to, SDV-like, show an item the character is carrying once they’ve picked it up. Some of which, they’d be picking up by swinging a tool at it like cracking a rock or cutting down a tree.
The main thing would be selecting which characters to provide animations like that for. How do you feel about editing sprites – say you had an animation template w/ a blank sprite and you could mix and match whatever body/clothes art and hair/face you liked from my stuff? I have been wondering if it would help my customers to have templates but I’ve also been reluctant to sell templates as I’ve heard some horror stories about what people wind up doing with them haha.
I think if you are worried about what the templates will be used for, it is enough to simply add in the terms of use that they cannot be used in games containing X, Y, Z. But I don't want to force you to do anything, of course :) My game doesn't intend to contain any "controversial content". The templates themselves would definitely be helpful, because I guess you wouldn't animate every character, even the side characters - that's understandable, it's a lot of work.
It’s definitely something to think about. I appreciate your point of view and I’ll announce or something if and when I do offer the templates but in the meantime I’ll think about adding some animations to at least some of the sprites (“heroes”, like you suggested) after the next Nine Realms thing I’m doing (it’s portraits!).