Yes, there is a lot to cover but to put it simply i’ll give you a list of Animating and Figure making tips and submissions because i’m in a good mood:

Animating:

– Before you start a project that you question whether you can accomplish well or not, make sure to have some basic practices covered first, Walk cycle, Run cycle, Punch, Kick, Jump, Flip, Energy blast, Weapon attack / sword slash.

– Try and understand what frame rate you want to use for a certain project, if you’re going for an anime, keep it slow as anime can look choppy. Not too much though because in action scenes the frame rate increases slightly.

– Backgrounds, Foregrounds and character / crowd movement is important to make your animation seem more alive. To cover all the examples would take an infinite amount of time, literally so here are a few examples, When creating a japanese sword fight animation with only sakura trees and buildings in the background, use window glimmers, tree leaves swaying and birds in the sky. Another example, a dark city fight, use rain, clouds and lightning through the clouds flashing, moving lights on roads to resemble cars, car sounds / city life sounds.

– Using stickfigures of your own style to keep consistent throughout, difficult to pull off although has a massive pay out.

– Not all animations are easy to animate, even experienced animators struggle, so refer to real movements or sketch your ideas / storyboard first.

– Plan your animation roughly.

– Make some kind of interactions in a fight animation to keep it interesting and unique. Exceptions can be made where this is nothing and things are slow paced to build suspense.

Stickfigure Creation:

– Try and not use polyfills when filling a shape unless you have an awkward filling space and the polyfill takes up a little amount of nodes.

– Try and master your own unique style, practice various things, facial features, design of bodies etc.

– Tracing is very crucial and almost every user does it.

– Progress slowly don’t jump to creating a detailed car or something.

– Figure out a good naming system and layering system for your stickfigures, for example: ‘Objects – Katana – 27 8 2020 – Layer 1’ that classified the Katana as an object, made on the 27th of august and is the first layer.

– Be wise with your node count and don’t be afraid to add another stickfigure to have more node space.

– Don’t add too many fine details with far away stickfigures as they won’t be visible and take up space. To make it easier use the first layer stickfigure as the rough shape for the stickfigure, the second for detailing so when far away you use the first layer and when close you use the second detail layer.

– Use references and look at other animations to accomplish the desired results, look at avatar or something for a water stickfigure. Don’t always rely on Stick Nodes tutorials as a lot i’ve seen are flawed.

Submissions:

– Users like to see detailed stickfigures but also sinple clean symmetrical ones.

– Effects, Backgrounds and Meme / Internet culture stickfigures do well, for example: Siren Head, FNAF, Dragon Ball.

– Don’t spam upload stickfigures that may be flawed, try and develop your style if you see you aren’t getting as many downloads and upvotes as you may have hoped.

– Always use custom high quality thumbnails to entice users into downloading although try not to use images or other non-custom thumbnails as they look low-effort and export badly as they are low quality.

– Name your stickfigures conveniently, Ralph will likely upload it sooner as well because of it’s ease of accessibility. Especially a thumbnail as well to decrease the waiting time.

Side note: Don’t aim for badges, aim for high-quality submissions. Keep your animations and stickfigures in your comfort level and exceed slightly and progressively not exponentially otherwise you are bound for failure.

This was an extremely long post so good luck reading it all although this is all I have to say while I try and process thought at this current hour. Also keep in mind i’m no experienced animator but i’ve learnt a lot.