As for the design, I just started to sketch out some ideas for a four leg hippo, but the hardest part of this would be making the animation. I've done some minor animation in photoshop before but nothing serious and complicated, making a sprite walk or run would be the hardest thing I've done animation wise on photoshop.
These were my initial sketches with a four frame walk animation. To aid in the leg animation I searched a lot of four leg animation reels, such as dogs and wolves etc. They all had very similar movement to what I wanted so I could successfully mimic the movements and incorporate them into my design.
This is how the walk animation in the sketch phase ended up looking like - I was actually very pleased with the animation as a whole and now the only thing for me to do with the hippo was just polish him up and colour him correctly.
All in all the animation for the legs was definitely the hardest part for me to do, here is a quick insight of my technique to how I did this, I'm not sure if this was optimal but this was the first thing I thought of and I just decided to go with it.
THE METHOD
In Photoshop the method I did for animation was basically drawing the legs on each frame, on a separate layer, and then in the animation palette, on each frame I would hide or show the appropriate layers for each corresponding frame.
In the layer palette it looked something like this -
Layer's 22 and 23 were just an addition to the leg animation so that it would be a little more advanced, they are the layers for his bottom and head moving up and down.
If I were to do this animation again the only thing I would change in my process of this would be the amount of frames in the entire animation, I stuck to four to be safe as this was my first proper 2D sprite animation, but after doing it once, I realised I could've made it a lot cleaner and smoother if I added another 2 or 3 frames just for a little extra detail in the movement.
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