Animate it

Animation looks like magic and is embarrassingly simple:

Change something slightly. Wait. Repeat.

That's it. A character walks because its costume swaps between two poses, over and over. Something floats because it moves up two steps, then down two steps, forever.

Every animation you've ever seen — film, games, cartoons — is this same trick at speed.

A sprite can have several costumes — different pictures of the same character.

Swap between them inside a loop and the character appears to move:

forever
    next costume
    wait 0.2 seconds

The wait is essential. Without it the costumes change hundreds of times a second and you see a blur. The speed of an animation is decided by that wait value — and tuning it is the difference between a walk and a sprint.