BBreakfast, that is very nice! But, I can imagine it being difficult to animate... I've seen the screenshots of you game, and it looks very much inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics. Now, if I haven't played FFT in a long time, but I do know that several square-soft games from the PS1 era used a method of animating sprites in parts instead of animating completely be hand. For example, in Legend of Mana, if you look at the ripped sprite sheet, it's made of a couple different parts. These are ripped straight from the disc, as is(if I recall correctly- I did some texture ripping on ps1 games, LoM specifically as a young'n and this looks very familiar!):
http://www.spriters-resource.com/fullview/6304/There's a lot of hand-drawn frames, but there's a bit of segmentation here which gives the sprites a unique animation style, and there's less need to redraw the weapon since it's a different sprite with modular frames(but, I'm there was a some special engine magic square soft did that is probably rather difficult). However, I feel like this method taken further could be a huge time saver! In fact, you see a lot of segmentation in Final Fantasy Tactics sprites:
http://www.spriters-resource.com/resources/sheets/2/1487.pngCheck out the chocobo, it's almost completely chunk-animated!
http://www.spriters-resource.com/playstation/fft/sheet/1341/I wish I could find the ripped sprite data(like the PS1 game sprite sheets), but I swear Seikendensetsu 3(the bosses especially) and Treasure of the Rudras, two snes games by the wizards at Square, used this in a couple spots. I'm not sure if they were stored in frames, or in several pieces(I know that overlaying sprites on another to do complex segmented animation would be near impossible or require some tricky work-around) all I can find for those are just sprites that are screen capped and assembled into a sheet...
However, I must say I prefer the way your sprites are animated- it's very organic. Like something out of Disgaea(sp?) and while I'm not particularly a fan of those games, there's no arguing they have nice sprites.
Perhaps maybe utilizing a technique like this, modular sprite pieces, assembling bits, and tweaking them to speed up the workflow? Incorporating some kind of funky animation system into whatever your using would probably not be worth the hassle, but that doesn't mean you can't try to use the look! Maybe it would help, maybe not...
But all in all, it's a nice animation.
Developer
