Animation should not be a step 1. Especially when you’re one person trying to make a game happen. Or anything. You should start with some concepts, you should make some placeholders and slowly replace them later, when you’ve made the thing work.
I failed at that, halfway. I sat down to make some not-animated placeholders. Just so I can tell apart when my first asset is facing to the left, to the right, or doing something, like attacking. And then to both my dismay and joy those placeholders quickly escalated to me spending my free moments instead rewatching tutorials and practicing to get back into pixel art. Which will certainly prove useful in the future.
Now these placeholders were more work than intended. And aren’t as placeholder-y as intended. BUT there’s one positive effect to that kind of failure. Every step through relearning how to do pixel art and relearning how to make said art move, you can tell yourself “It’s fine to be lazy with this step or to make mistakes, it’s just a placeholder.” It removes some pressure you give yourself. That being said, see two showcases of the first pixel animation made by me in ages placeholders below:
