I Need Beginner Advice For 2d Animation And Character Customization

New to unity, but pretty good at drawing. I want to make a 2D robot battle game with robot customization like changing the body, legs, arms, and holding weapons. So I made a robot character and broke it down into several body parts, do I make the entire animation in Unity or use a software and import it into unity? Sounds like alot of work, or is it easier with 3D?

 

You basically have two choices on how to do 2d animation. I'm not an expert here, but I've recently researched this myself.

1. Sprite Sheets
A sprite sheet contains multiple images for each frame of animation.

Examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=sprite+sheet&oq=sprite+sh

This is by far the easiest to get started with, but if you have lots of customization you'd have to create a lot of images. If you were to change your mind about something, you'd have to modify all the images.

2. Skeletal animation

Skeletal animation is more flexible, but takes more time to get working. Once you get it to work, you will save a lot of time though.

You could use the Unity 2D Animation package for skeletal animation. It's quite new, so it's a bit light on features at the moment. It could be enough for you though.

Here's the forum: https://forum.unity.com/threads/2d-animation-v2-preview-packages.599356/
This is the tutorial I used to get started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIuizGzY2A

You could also use Anima2D (bought by Unity) or Spine. As far as I understand, Unity 2d animation is a version of Anima2D made from scratch to be more integrated with Unity.

There should be many tutorials for Spine, and it probably has a lot of features. I know nothing about it though.
One example tutorial for Spine (by Thomas Brush, maker of Pinstripe):

 

Hello,
If you want to make a robot game or you make a robot whose skeleton moves then you have to go with unity 2D animation package it provides all the tools which you need
Also if you are new in this field then you have to follow some youtuber like
Brackeys
These guys do an awesome job on skeleton animation you can check it.
Hope this will help you
Thanks