Guide
How to draw a stick figure fight
Most stick figure fights fail the same way, and it is not the drawing. It is that there are too many drawings and not enough poses. Here is the order that fixes it.
1. Draw the hit first
Do not start at the beginning. Start on the frame where the fist or the foot arrives, because that is the drawing the whole fight exists to deliver. Get the contact right, then work backwards to the wind-up and forwards to the recovery. If you animate in order you will spend your best attention on the approach and arrive at the hit tired.
It helps to know how little of a move the contact actually is. In our game the straight punch is 38 frames long at 60 frames a second and the fist lands on frame 14. The uppercut is 45 and lands on 14. The jump kick is 66 and lands on 20. Two thirds of every move is what happens after the hit.
2. Twelve points is the whole figure
A head, a neck, a pelvis, one bend in the torso, an elbow and a hand on each side, a knee and a foot on each side. Twelve points. That is the entire rig we draw, and it is enough for every move in the game.
Working in points rather than lines is the trick that makes a fight drawable. You are not drawing a body, you are placing twelve dots and then connecting them. Move the dots, and the pose changes without the proportions drifting, which is what usually goes wrong between frame four and frame nine.
3. Count poses, not frames
A fight is not a number of drawings, it is a number of shapes you can name: guard, coil, extend, contact, follow through, recover. If a viewer cannot name the shape, the frame is not doing work. Draw the named ones properly and let the in-betweens be quick.
This is also the honest answer to "how many frames should a stickman fight be". As many as it takes to get through the named poses and no more. A punch that reads is usually five or six shapes.
4. Weight lives in the support foot and the hips
The single most common problem in a stick figure fight drawing is a figure that floats. The fix is nearly always below the belt. Plant one foot, and let the hips travel before the shoulders and the shoulders before the hand. A punch that starts at the hand is a pointing gesture. A punch that starts at the back foot is a punch.
On the struck side the same rule runs backwards: the head goes first, then the shoulders, then the hips, and the feet leave the ground last if they leave at all.
5. Leave more room between them than you think
This one cost us a day. At the distance where a kick still technically connects, the two heads overlap and the foot disappears behind one of them, so the kick, the thing the whole drawing is for, is the one thing nobody can see. The strike has to land on the front of the other figure, where the camera can watch it arrive.
So set the gap for the picture, not for the reach. If the limb that does the work is not fully visible against empty space at the moment of contact, push them apart and redraw.
6. Slow the landing, not the wind-up
Slow motion is a reward, not a stall. Play the approach at full speed and stretch the frames after the contact. In our game the knockout drops the clock to about a fifth for roughly a second, and it starts at the moment of impact, not before it. A slow wind-up just looks like a slow fighter.
7. Silhouette test
Fill every frame with solid black and look at it. If you cannot tell what is happening from the shape alone, the pose is not clear, and no amount of detail will save it later. This is why stick figures work at all: they are silhouette and nothing else, so a bad pose has nowhere to hide.
8. Trace, do not invent
Nobody has the timing of a real kick memorised. We do not either. Every move in STIX Duel is traced by hand off reference footage, pose by pose, and then checked back against the footage until the rhythm is right. Invented timing is the difference between a fight that reads as a fight and one that reads as a diagram moving.
What you draw it in barely matters
FlipaClip, Stick Nodes, a drawing app with onion skin, or a corner-of-the-page paper flipbook. They all work, and people make good stickman fight animation in all of them. What decides whether it reads is the order in this list: the contact frame, the named poses, the weight, the gap. A tool will not give you those and no tool will take them away.
If you want to export the result as a stickman fight animation gif, do it last, at the size you will actually post it. Judge it at that size too. A fight that only reads on a laptop does not read on a phone.
Where to see this done
Every attack in our game is on one page, frame by frame, with the contact frame marked and the real frame counts next to it. It is the fastest way to see the points above applied to a move you can scrub one tick at a time.