Member-only story
Animating Sprites in Unity
Lets face it, without assets and animations our games loose their immersion pretty quickly. Unity3D gained its reputation as the indy developers go to over the past several years due to its awesome and intuitive sprite animation tools.
In the screenshot above and to the left you can see these animations in action from a simple game demo I created on Kongregate for a Game Design Certification from Michigan State called Super Ninja Girl. We have a rotating helicopter blade, some smoke particles, a character that appears to be breathing and idle and some shiny collectibles for the player to collect.
To bring this same life to our 2D Space Shooter we need to spruce up the game with some animations. We will start with the sprites from the power ups we created for the modular powerup system. First we will start by adding a new Animations folder to our project view. We will use this to keep our animations separated from other game files for organization purposes.
Next we need to work with the power up prefab we created yesterday. So we can pull it into the hierarchy for now so that we can build the animation. We are also going to need the Animation Window so click Window > Animation > Animation or press Ctrl + 6.
To reach our desired effect we will need to work with sprites. My project already has the sprites sliced into the desired layout for easy animation, but you might find yourself working with a sprite sheet in the future. So we will discuss how to work with a sprite sheet first.
SPRITE SHEET IMPORT AND SLICE
To demonstrate I am going to use a sprite sheet from Open Game Art. First I downloaded the sprite sheet and dragged it into the Project assets. That leaves me with a full sprite sheet.
As you can see the inspector has already detected the file is sprite sheet and has imported some basic settings. What we are interested in is the drop down Sprite Mode which we want to change from Single to…
