Modular Animation

Modular animation for 2d? Could you describe your system and what you're trying to do a little more specifically?

Sorry if I was unclear. I found this video:

and I wanted to incorporate animation similar to that of which is used to animate the golem on my characters.

maybe I used the wrong term, sorry about that.

Well, from the video it looks as if the golem is constructed of multiple parts that form a hierarchy (e.g. torso -> upper leg -> lower leg -> feet).

Then the individual parts are rotated arount their joints. This could be done via skeletal animation which is applied to a 2d skeleton instead of 3D and doesn't make use of skinning.

I have attempted to create a skeleton of rotating parts by placing the body parts relative to the torso's position and rotating them back and forth to preset angles. I really do not like to hard-code and of my work and this way seems very tedious; not to mention a I bet that it runs very slowly. Are there any techniques to doing this to make the code more generic and run efficiently?

Skeletal animation isn't hardcoded by itself. And it's not really slow.

Generally, skeletons along with animation data are provided as part of your character, i.e. it would consist of a file containing the skeleton and animations and one or more files containing the individual body parts. Thus everything is artist-controlled.

Additionally, you could apply inverse kinematics to make your character respond to the environment.

When rendering you'd update the skeleton by rotating the bones around their joints and apply the transformations to the attached body parts. Note, however, that if you use sprites for your characters you'd normally have somewhat rigid parts, i.e. they would rotate and maybe scale but they wouldn't change their shape.

You could, however, provide a sprite for each animation step and combine multiple independent parts to one character. But that would require the artist to create every single animation frame.

Or you could apply some transformation on your sprites but if they go beyond simple rotation, translation and scaling you might get a significant performance hit.