Slant-down vector sprites

I think I’m getting somewhere now with this latest character graphic idea. Here’s what my down-idle-1 frame looks like so far (made in Inkscape):

Keeping with the vector graphics system I’m already using, I should be able to do cel animations based on a combination of state, direction, and movement. In this case, the state is idle, direction is down, and movement is none, so it’ll cycle through the down-idle frames. It’s a pretty normal approach, except I don’t see it done much with vector assets.

The main difficulty I’ve seen so far is that I want to point characters toward the cursor crosshairs continuously, which is not so simple to do well when the z-axis is not 100% perpendicular to the screen (hence “slant down” view and not “top-down” view). To do it well, I’m planning on picking eight directions: down, down-right, right, up-right, up, up-left, left, and down-left, and making separate frame sets for each. Then, when “rotating” the sprite toward the cursor, I’ll be rounding to the nearest frame set direction.

To be able to continue identifying teams by color (and later, with different character sprites as well), the head and body path fill colors will be set to the team color, everything else (in this case, outfit) staying the same.