I am not sure if it's the best to start with mp, because it's pretty complicated and with panels you can't use the helper functions gs offers you to make it easier.

Imo it would be the best, if you create for a player entity a struct, which holds all information like position, health, name, etc. and a pointer to a panel.

for the animation of the character you should look into the window element of panels.

the tricky part about 2d games is, that you have to code your own 'camera'. All you need is a vector, that stores the cams positions (top left corner works always fine) and for every element in a scene a vector that stores its absolute (=world) coordinates.
If you now as example move the camera 10px to the right, everything on screen is getting shifted 10px to the left. so to get the screen position of the panels, you have to take their world coordinates and subtract the cameras position.

I hope I could clear things up a little bit
Scorpion