I started today by trying to implement and use the inverse kinematics (IK) features to make it easier to move limbs around for animations. However, there were so many frustrations with how IK works in Godot that I eventually just gave up, scrapped it, and reverted to manual forward manipulations.

I tweaked the walking animation to have the big arms helping, then added a "running" animation (that's more of a gallop). I'm not sure I'm happy with how the running animation looks, so I'm going to ask my pre-alpha testers to choose between this running/galloping and another animation I called "loping" (which is just running with the arms).

I also tweaked how it handles velocity and animation speed so that the galloping animation can have variable speed. This allows it to better match up with how the big arms can propel the character much further than the legs. No sliding allowed!

Next up, I really need to start using AnimationTrees, as the state-switching is getting too complicated for a single function in code.

The "running" and "loping" animations: