You may have heard about the famous 12 principles of animation. Two Disney animators formulated and introduced them in 1981. These principles are really important if you care about how the animation looks in your movie or game.
In Amazin Escape, the game I am working on now, the main protagonist is a jumping lamp. It jumps all the time and certainly different kinds of animations are an essential part of the game. When I worked on them I tried to follow the principles thoroughly.
While developing a prototype for a new game I am working on right now, I decided to use free assets as much as possible. For animations I found Animation Starter Pack by Epic Games very useful. You probably don’t want to use it in your actual game – but it’s really good for answering a lot of questions about your gameplay. And it is a perfect placeholder for future production-quality animations.
I just finished another iteration of my project where paid a lot of attention to polishing the main character animations. This is how it looks so far:
