I made a video with my nephews this summer. This hit movement was acted by my niece Lucy (profile view).

Then I extracted 10 frames with Kdenlive and drew above them with Inkscape. 10 frames may be a bit too much for a game may be but you can choose the best poses.

My niece had a thinner stick in the video but she has a lot of energy ! In the video, the stick hit the ground but I think it's not realistic when you hit another character in a game so I changed the pose a bit (picture 6) .

My character is rather simple, it's just to test my animations and it's supposed to be only 60px high in the game I contribute to. For this game, I have simplified my animation to only 5 frames, and I provide the animated gif as an example.

Timing:

picture 1 - static1: frame 1

picture 2 - smash1: frame 5

picture 3 - smash1c: frame 12

picture 4 - smash2: frame 21 --> stick in her back

picture 5 - smash2b: frame 24

picture 6 - smash3: frame 38 to frame 51 (pause in the video: 13 frames staying still) --> stick on the ground in the video

smash3b was extracted from the video but not drawn with inkscape

picture 7 - smash3c: frame 64 (you should put at frame 51 to delete the pause)

picture 8 - smash4: frame 67 (you should put at frame 54 to delete the pause) --> stick in her back

picture 9 - smash 4b: frame 74 (you should put at frame 61 to delete the pause)

picture 10 - smash 5:frame 81 (you should put at  frame 68 to delete the pause)

picture 1 again - static2: frame 89 (you should put at  frame 76 to delete the pause)

The name Sintel comes from the Durian project, I took a bit of inspiration to dress my character but it's not as sexy as her! Stick is the name of a character in Ultimate Smash Friends, a smash bros like game I'm contributing to. Stick-sintel may become Stiktel if I use it in this game one day.