To save time and achieve a consistent look, all of the NPC’s override the player animation controller

Concept

I started the NPC design process by not so quickly sketching out 36 possible characters that I could possibly include in the main basophil town area. Trying to come up with unique hairstyles that still looked believable was probably the hardest part, but I really like how most of them turned out.

I made sure to include some characters that fit the specific roles that I needed in the game

After drawing out the concepts I picked out the ones that I thought would best fit into the game world and be distinct from one another.

Animation

To save time, most of the NPC’s in this game are drawn and animated off of the original player sprite. The damage and death animations are the same so I only didn’t have to recreate those every time.

The amount of animation given to a character was based on the amount of movement they have in the game.

• Every character receives an idle animation
• Characters that jump are given a jump up and down animation
• Characters that walk back and forth are given a running animation
• Any special animations are also done

Unity Animator

With the original player animations, I created a base NPC Animator Controller which receives the same parameters as the player controller but has simplified transitions. I then used Animation Override Controllers for each of the NPC’s to override the necessary animations for each character. This saved a lot of time setting up animators and was easily tested by giving the player the Override Controller.

Not Mario