Animating

I have started drawing animations for my character. At the moment it is undetermined how many different animations I will need as I have not yet decided how many actions the player will have at their disposal. By this point, I have decided on a few actions the player will be able to carry out. The player will be able to do the following:

1. walk
2. jump
3. falling (animation only)
4. duck
5. grab ledges  (animation only)
6. jump from grabbed ledges
7. push objects
8. ground stomp

I have downloaded a platform resource pack on Stencylworks that offers a few extra behaviours. The following are behaviours I am considering:

1. running
2. double jump
3. wall sliding

I will only be able to decide whether it's worth having the above once I have had a better look at designing levels. The reason for leaving these behaviours until later is because they remove certain limitations on where the player can navigate to. Using the above behaviours allow the player to travel further, faster and access areas that may have previously been harder to get to.

Walking and Jumping

Using the above video as a reference I have been manually drawing my animations in Microsoft Paint. I stopped the video at 5 different frames in total and used them as a point of reference to animate the 'walking' behaviour. Below are my working examples.

The next step was to take these individual snapshots and put them into Adobe Photoshop CS5 and tweak the position of limbs from frame-to-frame over one another. Doing so in photoshop using mulitple layers allowed me to ensure the origin position of the player's head. This allowed me to produce a fluid walking animation which looped steadily.

I did followed a similar approach to achieve an animation of the player somersaulting for a jump animation, ending in a falling animation. 

I found this process of animation to be rather tedious, yet affective, as I was able to save and alter any frame as I pleased in order to accomplish a good animation.