They are in fact moving on their own.

Every moving part is a separated layer of the character, like in this picture:

These are used by an animation software called "Live2D"

The character have no animation by default, but you can add movement to each part individually and animate it via rotation, translation or scaling.

Every "layer" (torso, arms, legs, hair) are different entities drawn in order one over one another, this way you have control over every part (let's say you want to rotate the arm, but not the torso)

Now using the example of the game you've shown us, take the girl with the long red hair:
They probably have a sprite map for her body without the back of her hair and the hair sprite itself in another place, when rendering the scene, they will draw first the hair in it's position relative to the body rotate it a little to give a sensation of animation and then draw the body over it. This way the player feels as it is only one entity.

You can combine both sprite animation with this layering technique to obtain a hybrid animation like in the G.o.D.

Hope it was helpful.

Thanks Guilherme, I thought of this before and seems you are right about moving them like paper dolls will be a very good starting point. At the same time, I am still curious on how can they rotate the head along y-axis and render it smoothly like a slow motion 3D but still 2D animation. It's kinda hard to explain on words but you can check out the game as reference if you have time. I just thought they might be a very good animators or they are using a software or masking technique.

That's probably a combination of both techniques, while they move the eyes and hair side ways, the face is sprite animated so they can render the in between frames, once the face is 'enoughly' turned you flip those features horizontally. I'm not an animator myself so I can only guess that a good result is very hard to obtain.

Buster2000 solution is another technique you can combine with it.

None seems easy to the animator, lots of drawing and calculation for positioning the assets ^^'.

I don't believe that every is in a sprite sheet because this would need a lot of disk space and time to load for smaller devices. If you intend to release it on pc, MAY not be a problem to use huge sprite sheets (depends on how you use/load them).

They are in fact moving on their own.

Every moving part is a separated layer of the character, like in this picture:

These are used by an animation software called "Live2D"

The character have no animation by default, but you can add movement to each part individually and animate it via rotation, translation or scaling.

Every "layer" (torso, arms, legs, hair) are different entities drawn in order one over one another, this way you have control over every part (let's say you want to rotate the arm, but not the torso)

Now using the example of the game you've shown us, take the girl with the long red hair:
They probably have a sprite map for her body without the back of her hair and the hair sprite itself in another place, when rendering the scene, they will draw first the hair in it's position relative to the body rotate it a little to give a sensation of animation and then draw the body over it. This way the player feels as it is only one entity.

You can combine both sprite animation with this layering technique to obtain a hybrid animation like in the G.o.D.

Hope it was helpful.

Thanks Guilherme, I thought of this before and seems you are right about moving them like paper dolls will be a very good starting point. At the same time, I am still curious on how can they rotate the head along y-axis and render it smoothly like a slow motion 3D but still 2D animation. It's kinda hard to explain on words but you can check out the game as reference if you have time. I just thought they might be a very good animators or they are using a software or masking technique.

That's probably a combination of both techniques, while they move the eyes and hair side ways, the face is sprite animated so they can render the in between frames, once the face is 'enoughly' turned you flip those features horizontally. I'm not an animator myself so I can only guess that a good result is very hard to obtain.

Buster2000 solution is another technique you can combine with it.

None seems easy to the animator, lots of drawing and calculation for positioning the assets ^^'.

I don't believe that every is in a sprite sheet because this would need a lot of disk space and time to load for smaller devices. If you intend to release it on pc, MAY not be a problem to use huge sprite sheets (depends on how you use/load them).

Nice follow-up info. Never knew much detail of some of these techniques. Will take note of this. :)