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.