Any idea how to improve it?

I know the pose is not overly exciting, but that is because it is multipurpose.

Is that okay for PG-13?

Reversed sprite came to be a bit short which was exposed by the rotation gif.

Ok. When it came to movement and mounting the sprite on top of a horse, such arm position began looking really silly. And some two handed weapons will require a rather straight.

Of course I can draw a different arm sprite for the movement anim, but that will require drawing a version for each clothes type, which is a nightmare to produce, especially if I want to allow player modding the game. And I also want to port game to a Windows 95 era hardware, maybe Playstation 1, and these systems have memory limits, so constructing a sprite from parts greatly saves memory. Of course I can also use one of the pixel art rotation algorithm to do that on fly, but it is tricky. Moreover, auto-rotating the stuff looks okay only with specific poses, so I settled with a neutral arm position.

9000 edits later.

I'm sure it sill has a lot more errors, because producing sprites without a 3d model is really difficult. I.e. it took me some time to notice that the right arm will be really visible from behind.

Dunno if one can fit more details, and if such a base is good in general

There was huge pose issue, which I somehow managed to miss and which got apparent only when I did the 3d calculations. The base was leaning forward like a monkey, instead of standing upright like a human being. I'm terrible at measuring things by eye

Lost count which version of walk cycle this is

Redoing the few apparels I have.

Everything indeed looks order of magnitude with smaller torso.

Something I should have began with - drawing a skeleton:

But dunno if it is good enough now.

Thanks! It needs a lot of polishing.

I will be using these fat black outlines to make it fit with the flesh and skin base and the clothes for it. Dunno if there is a better solution.

Anatomy fixes and 180deg view

Designing a cape. Initially I made a huge one, covering entire body, but then went for a more flowing one, so that the the apparels could be seen even from behind. Now is the hardest part - animating it! I don't have super smooth animations, but the key frames should still be expressive enough.

The attack/throw animation is kinda wrong, because it has a misplaced center of mass. Real humanoid wont be moving up the left leg, when swinging from the left side. Instead the right leg will be used to balance the weight of the left one. Further more, the leg will physically get in the way of the object the character swings - I tried swinging like that with a tree branch and hit my leg  Third, it gets just mess graphically, when there is both scythe and the leg in the same area. Of course one can swing like the character in the anim above, but it will be inefficient. I think most people wont notice, but since I myself know it, I feel awkward not to fix it, unfortunately now I have 3 such bases, together with apparel, to update

TLDR: I need to learn physics.

But not all jRPGs, Ogre Battle mixes two styles, with half of the characters using the other side leg to balance, and the other half the same side leg, without any logic. For example, there are two-handed axe knights, one usual, and the other boss. Both have the same initial stance, yet they use different legs to balance. Although the big one changes the legs mid animation. Beyond the Beyond too uses this exact attack anim and mixes the weight balancing styles. Now I'm really confused and need a comment from a professional animator

Hooded characters pose additional difficulty in that they should still have their hair color readable to make most use of it to differentiate the characters.

So much time, and I still find the errors with that female base.

The scapula bones will have to be more pronounced with this pose, and there should be a clear shadow, since the character shoulders lean a bit back.

I doubt even a 3d model will help finding such issues, unless the model actually simulates muscles and bones. Setting up such a model will require a lot of time, and Blender doesn't support that.

This time I'm using my voxel editor to get rough estimates of how it will look reversed. Originally it had the isometric projection cut feature, but somehow I managed to remove it during the development and never added it back. So I'm cutting it out manually for now, after projecting the sprite onto a cylinder inside isometric space. Mapping onto a cylinder is not how voxel modeling works, but it gives a hint. For proper voxel modeling you begin with a skeleton, match it to the sprite and then add "meat", although you can start directly with sculpting the shape. Voxel graphics is similar to pixelart. And in fact it can produce 1-to-1 correspondence for pixelart sprites, which is very good for mostly 2d games, which need to have 3d effects once in a while, so sprite will look pixel perfect for their drawn angles, but will have a bit of distortion when rotated. Unfortunately voxel editors are really clunky to use, so I need to finish developing mine if I ever want to have voxel sprites in the game

Not sure if it really an improvement, but the character definitely went on a diet

Trying to fit the laying down sprite into a single 64x32 cell.

Otherwise it could end up with head or legs floating around the cliff.

My isometric engine uses topological sorting to implement the painter algorithm.

It works for primitive Diablo 2 style scenes, like open cave with a huge boss.

Yet in more complex Ultima 8/XCOM style scenes the sorting may lock and the tile below will cut the sprite legs.

XCOM solved that by breaking larger sprites into cell sized chunks.

And that was a chore for the artist to do.

Ultima 8 engine was far more advanced and solved it using topology.

So it is still nice to have everything fit into single cell.

Therefore I made the pose horizontal and also bended it into S-shape.

Originally it was laying on its back like in a coffin.

And being horizontal it can be 90deg rotated and reused for other purposes:

By breaking these sprites into head/arms/legs/torso parts, I also get the sitting frame

In fact it is required for my game, since characters can lose limbs and I want some gore, like decapitation.

So far it was not as much art adventure as a technical one.

Redrawing the male now

The only things that dont change are the heads.

Somehow I manged to make them good enough on the first try.