Colin Walks - How three Sessions of Animation work finally clicked.

Getting a character to animate in Unity sounds like a checkbox task. Import sprites, set up an Animator, done. In practice it took three sessions, a scrapped bone rig, a broken sprite sheet, a read-only clip, a missing Motion assignment, and two broken scripts before Colin took his first proper step.

Session 13 ended with us abandoning the bone rig approach entirely — Sprite Skin was causing rendering artefacts, bones visible in the game view, scale corruption. We switched to the Team Cherry method: hand-drawn frame sequences, no rigs, just PNGs played in sequence.

Session 14: generated a walk cycle via ludo.ai, exported as a sprite sheet, imported it, tried to slice it — and the grid didn’t line up. The sheet was 1102px wide, six columns, which gives 183.6px per cell. Not a whole number. Unity’s slicer was cutting every frame slightly wrong.

Session 15 (today): exported as individual frames instead. 36 PNGs, 357×676px each. No slicing required. Imported them, set up the animation clip properly — and this time, properly means via the Animation window with the Alien selected, not directly in the Project panel, because that gives you a read-only clip. Set sample rate to 12 FPS. Dragged all 36 frames in. They spread across the timeline correctly.

Then the animation still didn’t play. The Animator state existed, the clip existed, but the Motion field in the state was set to None. It doesn’t auto-assign. You have to click the little circle picker and select it manually.

Then we added an idle state (just frame zero held still), wired up transitions with an isWalking Bool parameter, and updated AlienController to set that parameter based on movement. Two other scripts — Soldier.cs and ToolWheel.cs — broke immediately because they were referencing blockMovement as a static field, which it no longer was. Fixed both with FindFirstObjectByType.

Colin now walks when you press WASD, idles when you don’t, and flips to face left when you go that way. Next session: camera follow, because right now he walks off screen and the world doesn’t move with him.

One step at a time. Literally.