I'm planning on putting out some free animated sprites, but I'm not sure how I should animate them so that the most people find them useful. What I'm mainly referring to is the character movement within the image frame. For a walking animation, it's quite simple and the character will stay in the middle of the frame for the entire animation sequence. But for a jump animation, should I just animate the motion and keep the character in the middle of the frame or should I move the character up in the frame at the same time? Moving the character around in the frame will make some of the animations easier but it means the coder having to take the in-frame movement into account when working on positioning the character. The alternative is to have the character perform the animation on the spot, where the coder can perform all of the movement instructions without having to worry about in frame movement. However a more complicated animation (such as pulling up from a ledge) would require an absolute load of re-positioning code to make it look right. These will be free sprites, so I'm not really looking to make both on the spot and moving versions of the animations (unless I can do it very easily). Thoughts welcome :)

I think I would just keep the character in the middle. If I have a character on screen and I code a jump button, when that button is pressed I am going to translate the character up anyways. Could be wrong however. I'm sure there are a bunch of different ways to handle this. In the end I would just do whatever is easiest and let whoever is going to use them worry about it.

Can't complain if they are free.