The past two weekends, I have been working on revising the design and animations of the main character. The old sprite has served prototyping fine, but it’s time to start working on actual art for some parts of the game, both so that I can start designing puzzles that use more subtle visual cues, as well as for the purposes of being able to promote the game at all. (Prototype grey-box environments can be fun to play around in, but don’t show very well)
Part of this process involved deciding on an approach for implementing the animations into the game. Unity already has a very robust and complex animation system built in to it, but it is much too complex for what I need for a simple 2D pixel art game. Unity’s animation system is built for handling complex motion blending and IK with 3D models. Also, it doesn’t really allow for easy control of animation switching from code. You have to establish all your animation parameters and transitions in the Animation FSM through the Animator panel.
So, I set about coming up with a quick and dirty replacement which would basically allow me to, in code, just say “play this animation now”. This took way longer than it should have, primarily because I couldn’t get a custom inspector for my new “Sprite Animation” component to display the information that I wanted correctly. Eventually I threw in the towel and just divided the system into two component types. One “Sprite Animation Strip” component is added for each individual animation, and there is a master “Sprite Animation” component which handles playing the animations and switching between strips.
It’s pretty messy, primarily because there’s no clear indication of which animation strip is which when you’re looking at the array under the Sprite Animation component. Because of this confusion, it’s not a particularly tenable system if you have dozens of animations, but for the time being it has served my purposes fine.
Here’s a gif of the current work-in-progress walking animation in action (the environment is still just grey boxes though:
There’s a lot of room for improvement. Most notably, I need to fix the hair so that it is always blowing in the same direction. To do this, I’ll probably make the hair a separate sprite which gets overlaid over the main one. Also she shouldn’t suddenly get a haircut when she is walking, but it is a good start.
Oh, and here’s a bonus gif of just the standing animations on top of a more detailed background.
Taiji 