(2016)

Working on some animation for a retro game.

This continues exploring this concept: https://www.sofurry.com/view/1544534 , creating a proper running animation for that dragon based on a cheetah.

First, maybe the most important: where you could get good references?

The cheetah comes from a slow motion footage (which disappeared from the Internet since - 2020), such are perfect for being used as reference for animating (I mirrored it to match the dragon's sheet I already had).
For walking and trotting cycles, someone recorded his dog on a treadmill ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrqOAwCPowg ), in slow motion, again something perfectly fitting for creating quadrupedal animations.

A few details related to the pixelling part.

First and foremost, it is not simply drawing what you see, especially in these small sizes. Frequently you need to make compromises, considering each pixel's role. Usually I try to get the coarse shape right first, frequently checking how the cycle looks like, and only if it sort of works would I start detailing. Not only the pixels are a limiting factor here, but also the colors (part of a 16 color palette), and that you only have a single colorkey for transparency (no opacity levels).

This is also 3:2 pixel aspect ratio (pixel width is larger than height), required by the target I am making the game for. This is especially noticeable on the head's forward - backward jitter: that's one pixel, and entirely on the horizontal axis, there is no way to smooth it (and skipping it, so fixing the head's location also looked awkward).

(2020)

This eventually became an actual game, Flight of a Dragon: https://jubatian.com/articles/flight-of-a-dragon-is-completed/