How to create proper isometric 2D animations

I'm new to unity and game development in general. I created really simple animations for a isometric 2D game. It's just a really quick drawn stick figure. I have an idle, run and attack animation for all 8 directions.

Running and idling already works as expected. I followed a youtube tutorial for this. Later I found out that there is a different way to handle animations with the Animator window. Which is probably the proper way to do it. So I configured my attack animations there, which already looks pretty confusing and unclear.


here is a screenshot of how my animator looks.

I can't imagine how this is going to be more overseeable than plain C# code after everything is connected properly and all animations (e.g. get damage for all directions, die for all directions, different weapons for all directions etc.)

watching this youtube tutorial by brackeys, he has much less animations in the animator, but the character, for example, already turns left and right as it should. I guess he flips him somewhere in his script on it's x axis. But even if I did, I would still need lots of animations, since I can't flip movement to southern directions to northern directions.

Am I missing something? Is this clutter (and non customizable lines) really how animation should be done? Or do I need to change how I animate things?

 

It's fine that you have more animations than a basic platformer would, but you should probably flip your character instead of creating two separate animations for opposite directions. I don't know what your game looks like, but you could probably just animate South, South-West, West, North-West, North, and then just flip SW, W, and NW for the other side.

I'm no expert with the animator though, so continue learning and looking at tutorials for better advice.

 

thanks, I think this will also be the best way currently. I also found out how the layering system in the animator works, so it should be a lot more convenient now, but still kind of messy (but a lot less)

 

You should check out Animancer (link in my signature). It lets you avoid Animator Controllers and just play the animations you want directly. The Directional Sprites examples show how you can easily set up the sort of animations you want without any of the mess.

 

I've looked into it now and it looks promising at first. I'm going to try it out in my project

 

If you flip your character, isn't it going to become left-handed, and vice versa?

 

Doubling your workload for a small detail like that isn't very practical, so it's a common compromise in 2D games to just flip the sprites. It's honestly not even something many people notice, look at Vanillaware's games for examples; however, Vanillaware does do a few things to make it less noticeable.