Animating within video games - Flob animations

Here is a step up from the concept art, we have still sprites at the moment which we are looking to improve on in the future. These are mainly to represent the character in engine (Unreel engine 4).
The engine has a reputation for being used predominantly for 3D games however it has it's own 2D tools, that we have utilised here.
Animating in video games is different to animated for cartoons. The animations need to respond and change to the players input. The system we have used is Epic's proprietary blueprint scripting system. We have used it to create an Animation State Machine that checks what the player is doing at any given time and outputs a specific "Flipbook". These are Unreal's name for sprite based animations. The basis of the system built can be seen below in Epic's tutorial. My partner has built this system as part of his work.

Below is the video of the system in action with the sprites I created. These sprites are currently static within system for placeholder purposes. Animated sprites will replace these that will make the character come to life even more. I will also create these.

Here is the idle animation prototype that I have created,it does need improvements. There is a slight colour change and the animation is a bit fast for an idle animation. We have yet o put in the game engine.