Ok, so I'm not a pixel artist. I'm more of a programmer.

In my spare time I'm working on a game using LPC assets, which are mostly great. I've made/edited some tilesets, but of course I also need to populate the world. The game in question is an action/adventure RPG (think A Link to the Past for inspiration), which means I need at least move and attack animations for different critters. Now, there is a lot of very useful art here. And there is also a lot of very nice looking static images, or incomplete animations. Expanding those (or finishing them) takes up a lot of my time (I posted one such outcome here a while back, for the Warthotaur), that I'd rather spend on the game code.

So, a couple of weeks ago I had an idea: what if I chopped up an LPC base image in different body parts (head, torso, arm, hand, leg, foot) and tried to reconstruct the animation by figuring out where the different parts fit best.

The result, for the south-facing base animation, is this:

Not too bad. In fact, I'm quite happy with it. Now, I can derive the required transformation from the base assets. Then I can apply those to a different image, after chopping it up in suitable ways. Let's try this guy again:

Result:

Again, not too shabby.

So, as a proof of concept, I'm quite happy with how this works out at this point. Some caveats. The biggest one is that the south-facing walking animation is probably the easiest animation to do this with. The attack animations are going to be far more challenging. Besides that, the output needs some manual polish to make it look good. It should still end up saving time compared to doing the entire animation by hand.