New Character!

I just got the 1st rough draft of the American football character from Chris! I spent today revamping the animation system so each character will default to a standard set of animations, but I can go in and make customizations where needed.  “But” someone, somewhere might ask, “Why not use the built in Unity animation system?” Well this is an excellent question, person who may not exist. I’ll explain.

player layersIn order to allow for custom uniform color combinations, as well as racism-proof skin tone auto-selection, the sprites have to be split into multiple layers. The first layer is the basic sprite as drawn. This is only needed for the details we don’t want to color. Then there’s the skin tone layer, right now this is as drawn but will eventually be set to a random skin tone. Then there’s 2 layers for uniform colors and each can be set independently so players can have custom team colors.

In order to use the built-in Unity animation system, I’d have to create 4 animations for every single type of player, and all 4 animations would be identical. Plus most player types will share a lot of animations, like running. Since all my sprites are laid out on a grid, coding my own was the logical solution and didn’t take much time

football and hockey vs. football and hockey
Here comes the pain train!

So the shading here isn’t great but that’s only because Chris hasn’t split the layers out nicely yet, this is just my quick and dirty Paint.Net job. But the differences between player types are starting to shine, and I can’t wait to get this a little further along to really flush them out more fully!

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