I am sort of new to developing games, and though i am good at programming, i cant for the life of me do art. I was wondering how you suggest to go about making attack animations so i atleast have someone sort of difference between each weapon without doing a seperate animation for every weapon, unless thats neccassary. I have 32x32 top down sprites if thats infos needed
A widely used approach is to reduce the effort by having only a handful of animations for the character - say sword, spear, axe, bow - and then animating corresponding animations for each weapon that you overlay on top. This lets you swap weapons between characters without needing to animate each character/weapon combo and because each weapon of a type must follow approximately the same path to match the character once you've got one down, adding more is comparatively quick.
Alternatively, or additionally, you can vary the attack speed or available attacks based on the weapon so a light or heavy sword, say, behaves differently. Or add particle effects over the top with different colours/shapes for different weapons.
Also google the 12 rules of animation. Timing, anticipation, overstretching etc... can really help giving the weapon weight and a certain feel.
