The first of many walk cycles.

Working on a few animations and character sprites with a small group for a new iPhone platformer. I was first asked to design the protagonist, no real restrictions on the look except that she had to be a teenage girl, wear a backpack, and look athletic/adventurous. We both eventually agreed on the middle design.

The character has your standard set of actions you'd expect in most platforming titles--running, jumping, attacking, all that noise. They gave me a list of actions that I'll be animating and I figured I should start with the basic run cycle.

I always have Richard Williams' Animators' Survival Kit on hand for times like this. I've heard how difficult walk cycles are so I was afraid to even touch them before now, and soon enough I figured out why... but it turned out okay for the first attempt. Still have to add the backpack and retrace the lines in a cleaner fashion once the basic motion is all ironed out. Hopefully I'll have a better version of this and more animations to show in the near future.