I've been at this for a while, but here's a look at our final boss. There were a lot of steps involved with the process so let's try to break it down.
First I wanted to get an idea of how she should move based on her appearance and personality. Of course all of those hands needed to do something, but I wanted to figure out other things like posture, as well as trying to avoid too many overlapping parts. There's also the fact that the developers wanted her to sit on a broom, but the broom had to be sent as a separate layer beneath the character's sprite. Naturally, this meant both legs had to be over the same side of the broom.
This was a preliminary animation that got tossed. They didn't like the pose. Too stiff, maybe?
It wasn't a complete waste of time though. By this point it was pretty clear what all the different parts would be doing. Now it was actually a matter of keeping everything separated, and working through them one at a time. The pose was changed to have her holding onto the broom, but the legs still needed to be on the same side.
The head, torso, and legs were a unit on their own. This segment moves the least with mostly the bobbing head and feet swaying.
The second unit consisted of the hand pigtail things in her hair.
That's... a little creepy looking.
The third unit was the hand waving the wand around. It was actually a bit of a challenge despite how little it actually moves. Mostly trying to keep the wand from growing and shrinking all over the place. I don't think it's too noticeable, though maybe I've been staring at this for too long.
Put them all together, and...
The broom and hat were easy since they were meant to be separate layers anyway. I just needed to stick them below and above the other parts, respectively. It was a matter of coloring everything at that point to get to the final result.
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