Create a Simple Custom Walk Cycle - Not Premade Walk Behavior

My Characters have very short stubby legs and arms, and it seems to me that the default walk behavior just moves too many things around to really work with my animals. So, I'm looking for the best way to create a few keyframes where I basically just move my legs around in a simple circle. I'm basically trying to figure out how to create a little keyframe animation for the legs that cycles. I've seen thumbnails of tutorials to build a hand-wave, but I'm wondering if I can have a limb animation loop, etc. Hopefully this is clear.

There are proibably more than 50 tutorials that all demonstrate the pre-made walk behavior, but I don't think I've seen one that builds a walk-cycle from scratch, so maybe that doesn't exist. But if that is a thing, I'm super interested.