Animation basics

First of all, let's discuss what animation is. An animation is made up of different images that are played in a certain order and at a certain speed, for example, movies that run images at 30 fps or 24 fps, depending on which format it is in, NTSC or PAL. When you pause a movie, you are actually seeing an individual image of that movie, and if you play the movie in slow motion, you will see the frames or images that make up the full movie.

In games while making animations, we will do the same thing: adding frames and running them at a certain speed. We will control the images to play in a particular sequence and interval by code.

For an animation to be "smooth", you should have at least 24 images or frames being played in a second, which is known as fps. Each of the images in the animation is called a frame.

Let's take the example of a simple walk cycle. Each walk cycle should be of 24 frames. You might say that it is a lot of work, and for sure it is, but the good news is...