Ah yes you definitely want to be able to see the full picture as you work. Most animators work with a key frame system, where they first draw the defining frames of the action and then when they're happy, add the 'tween frames that smoothen it out - which is easier work now you have a point A and point B for that frame to move between. Usually it's all very rough until they have every frame, they want to make sure they've captured the movement before they devote time to properly drawing and rendering.
I definitely don't envy you having to draw Dredd's eagle pad in subtle angle changes! You can still move it every frame though, it'd definitely look better. Here it is possessed by Judge Death and using all 8 frames to move, even though there's only 3 unique drawings:
One thing I'd really recommend to make it easier on yourself is go smaller next time, that's a big ol' sprite at around 150px tall and would prove challenging for most people! You can iterate quicker (feels good and is great for learning) and approximate more at lower resolutions all while getting more experience with the nitty gritty of pixel art, pushing single pixels around. The
fantastic Dredd sprite in the SNES game is about 1/3 the size of yours for example and not a small sprite at all (about 50px tall). My NES Dredd sprite is around 30px tall!
That's awesome you got to grips with it so quick, I've not used Construct but I've seen some great games made in it. Unity is a really powerful engine, I stick with Game Maker personally as it's great for low resolution 2d games and I hear you have to know proper programming languages to get the absolute most out of Unity. If I ever look at 3d I might have to make the jump though, Game Maker is.. a bit of a joke in that department
