Unity 2D Character Tutorials

To complement last Octobers Unity UI tutorials I’ve dusted off the microphone and created a short series on Unity 2D characters. What people seemed to enjoy most about my previous videos was how I cut straight to the point, trying to keep the content as concise as possible. I’ve kept that front and centre in the making of these new tutorials. Here’s a little run down of what can be learned in each video.

Sprites, Animations and Scripts

Cutting away the clutter to make an animating, moving character as simply as possible. This video covers:

• Creating an animation and an animator that loops through a set of images.
• Adding a script to your character that controls their position.

Sprites Sheets and Time

Improving upon the character from the last tutorial to make using him more efficient and robust. This video covers:

• Using Texture Packer to combine all of the characters images into a sprite sheet.
• Pulling from that sprite sheet to draw the character which reduces draw calls when more than one character of this type is on the screen.
• Movement using Time.deltaTime to keep the characters speed constant during frame rate spikes and dips.

Skeletal Characters and Animations

An alternative to the first video where a skeletal character is created and animated rather than using images. This video covers:

• Setting up a skeletal character with a sensible GameObject hierarchy.
• Creating smooth and flexible animations that can affect individual body parts.
• Moving between animation states at the click of a button

Depending on the popularity of these videos I’d be happy to carry on down this route or may turn to a different area of Unity.

See ya!