Hi. My coder friend and I are working on a personal project which is supposed to be this top-down 2D dungeon crawler. Here's what I have made so far. I'm looking for any advice regarding how to animate this huge sprite (it's 136 px tall, I'm seriously considering going down to 96 px) and how to paint in the details so the armor looks like it.
Walk cycles (there's no walk animation to the left because we took the easy route to flip the guy for the time being.)




The attack animation I rotoscoped with another friend who was willing to help. I know it is too slow for the gameplay to be enjoyable. I'll have to make another one that's faster in the following weeks. After that I'll work on combos.









Here's a quick room I came up with (here the guy is downscaled to 96px tall). The most frustrating parts about this entire thing is readability and colour count. This floor tile may be too repetitive for the amount of screen it covers. Staring at it makes me feel funny. I guess I'll have to break up the pattern and work on that contrast.


This is the result of a month's work. I seriously think I'm about to go insane if I keep working on this. please how can I make pixel art faster

Yeah, I see what you mean by making the body move instead of the legs. I guess that comes from literally not knowing how real people actually move around. I'll fix it later.

I guess I kind of just dove in with this huge sprite without much consideration and right now it's being more of a pain than I expected. I'm still at a stage where I can go back and redo everything, though. I'll have to have a long talk with my friends to convince them smaller sprites are faster to make, and are easier to make prettier. I can't see myself animating the entire enemy roster at this scale.
As for the Spriter tool, I'll look into it, but I've edited the post to clarify that I actually made the attack animations by filming my other friend swinging his sword around and rotoscoping the animation.

So we decided to totally redo the sprites

I have to say the first attack animation looked more realistic
+ he really is using that shield
+ more autentic
- less dramatic power in the swing

the new sprite has not much more dramatic power
I practice Iaido which is about japanese sword forms.
the sensei of my sensei (teacher of my teacher) said the movement should be like a wave.

now how to use that idea?
the knight lifts his sword to be ready to strike = as the wave grows up and become bigger.
+ this shouldn't be too fast.
+ and the knight could get his shield in position to guard incoming attacks.
+

the knight swings his sword down = the wave breaks down with a loud and mighty splash!
+ this is the fastest movement
+ the sword needs to shop trough the enemy. not just flesh but also his bones
+ the shield could move behind his body for this to make it look more dramatic

set a longer time the last frame of the slash part.
try to think of a wood chopper with his axe "chop... chop... chop.." instead of "chopchopchop"
or a smith with his big hammer and anvil "Bam! Bam! Bam!" and not "bambambam"

the enemy is cut down = the wave moves back slowly to raise again.
the enemy is down. and if not, the knight can raise his sword again or poke him with his sword as an additional attack.


now that was my point of view