The first walk cycle for Tuft, a villager in my game Im working on. I did this mainly as a test to see how smooth my animations could be, and how feasible it is to sneak in a bunch of in betweens time wise. 

As far as the animation itself goes, Im pretty happy with it, though there are some noticable issues, mainly coming down to my process of in betweening. I was just mostly focused on making the different clusters blend into eachother as smoothly as possible, without really thinking through how the objects should actually move, leading to a sorta interpolated look, and different issues like how his barrel on his back looks like its made of rubber, or how he kinda just looks around aimlessly. I don't think these are huge issues that are worth redoing large parts of the animation, but making sure I don't go on autopilot during the in betweens is a good lesson for myself going forward.

But my main struggle is deciding if I should make all the animations in my game this smooth, which is something that would look really tight and would be a good selling point for the game, but would come at the cost of double the time for each animation. I could either make every animation this polished with in betweens, or I could spend that time making almost double the amount of total animations and use those frames to flesh out the characters personalities more. Though the in-betweens are faster to make than the key frames so it wouldn't be exactly twice the amount, but still more time nonetheless. 

Anyways I know there are some super talented animators on this site that have definitely ran into the same issue before so if anyone has any advice on the matter I would love to hear it!