Very neat stuff, and impressive effort with minimal modifications.

I agree with BenCreating that the south-facing "chop" animation probably will not really look right unless re-drawn. That may or may not be a problem for the gameplay you have in mind. For instance, I think the south-facing axe and pickaxe animations look fine and could still be used to crop trees/smash rocks, even though in the east/west-facing directions the character is starting with the tool/weapon higher over their head and swinging down. If I were making this game, I would favor using the existing base sprite animation and settling for a slightly different south-facing animation (as pvigier has done), since re-drawing the "chop" animation would require that any clothing or other sprites also be re-drawn. Even at 2 frames each, that's a lot of work :p

I think the issue is that the east/west-facing animations really need some motion blur and some 3D perspective. For example, if the character is chopping a tree, the axe should start in the same plane as the character, but by the middle of the animation, with the arm outstretched, the axe head should be parallel to the ground. This can't really be achieved just by rotating the sprite in 2D. Of course, if they are splitting logs, the animation should be more like what you have, but motion blur would still help. I think the only real solution is to re-draw the animation, which will produce a much nicer result.

Same applies to the north-facing animations. There seems to be a small error where the second-highest frame is drawn layered on top of the character's head, but that doesn't really make sense with the way the item is being swung.

For the walk-cycles, you can definitely get away with just rotating the sprite and some cropping. But I would suggest using the walk cycles from my extended weapon animations or BenCreating's medieval weapons as a base to determine the right angle of rotation. The walking animations in DarkwallLKE's original sprites don't really look right to me at all :p

Thanks! Yes, more phases are possible, it's just a matter of work ;-) It wasn't part of castelonia's original requirements, but I'd like to do seasonal variations for all the trees too, and would add flowers to some of the "spring" variations. You can see that for the cherry tree. Pear trees have pretty white flowers too, which I'd like to add at some point.

Wow! These new hairstyles are great!

I think these two most recent ones will be more useful than the earlier ones, since they are drawn in the same resolution as everything else and use a more restricted color palette. Great work!

I think it's still useful! Perhaps more useful actually, especially if you can pre-generate the color variations. That way people can either use the assets directly in a standardized palette, or can easily make new recolors, programmatically or manually. This is what an older version of the character creator/universal spritesheet did for hair and facial hair: https://github.com/jrconway3/Universal-LPC-spritesheet (check out the _build/ subdirectory). They had all the hair objects in 4 directions, drawn using a standard pink palette, then included a set of Ruby/ImageMagick scripts to recolor them against a set of palettes and also generate the full spritesheet with all the different animations.

I also adapted those scripts to work for shields and headgear, so it generates the full sheet from a few images and can do automatic recolors (I think either BenCreating or maybe Basto has done something similar too, maybe for headgear?). I never shared those scripts but probably should if it would be helpful.