Rhythm Quest Update 7 - Character Animation

There are still a number of things that need to happen before this can feel like an actual "game".  In the game dev process there is always this point in a game's life where it finally becomes FUN and everything comes together -- my focus now is to try and work on the things that need to happen in order to get to that point.  One of them is that I need to actually have character animations for attacking, jumping, and shielding (I decided that "shield" will indeed be the third action, since I couldn't think of anything better).

Out of all the work that needs to be done for putting together a game, art is by far the one that I struggle with the most.  I definitely took a number of hours trying to work out what the (first) character will look like and come up with something that I could actually animate successfully.  I tried a few humanoid figures, none of which worked at all, spent a long time wondering how the heck I came up with the Ripple Runner sprite (which works just fine), considered just re-using the Ripple Runner character and coloring it differently, and then finally managed to get something working with a Kirby-like design:

It certainly took way longer than I would have liked, but I'm pretty happy with how it's working now.