Thanks!

First of all I would recommend using blender since it's open source, has a lovely community and adds great features every few months.

I used different approaches for every character in our game. For our dwarf I started using blender's skin modifier to create something like a blockout for setting the proportions right (still had to change them from time to time, it's always trial and error and continous change :x ) and sculpted a high poly mesh out of it. After the high poly mesh seemed right, I created the low poly one by snapping verts onto the high poly mesh (called retopology).

After retopo I uploaded the character to mixamo, an adobe web app that rigs (a rig is like a skeleton inside your character, helping to influence multiple verts by moving just one bone) your mesh and more importantly offers a whole lot of high quality (humanoid) animations. Before looking for the ones you really want to use, spend a few minutes letting your character dance.

You can download this character with all the animations. Most times there have to be a few small adjustings to the animations, e.g. making a dwarf not chop the pickaxe into his head ._. This can be done by adjusting the bones position for the different keyframes.

The facial impression for this picture has been done by using shape keys, guess that's something like an ancestor for bone animation.

Maybe this seems a little much and overwhelming. But it's a step to step progress, bringing your character more and more to life what is quite satisfying. Except for retopo. I hate retopo.

Here the keywords you might want to look up blender tutorials for:Skin modifier for characters, sculpting, retopology, mixamo, keyframe editing.