2D Sprite Characters in 3D World and Locked Camera

Questions & Answers
1

Been reading, searching and finding alot of great tutorials on the net that have helped. I found this site so helpful:

http://www.burgzergarcade.com/hack-slash-rpg-unity3d-game-engine-tutorial

So much great info but he is doing a behind the shoulder 3rd person. I also found this guy on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrANa7z5yfQ

and been watching his videos and they are great. My question is this: I want do a flat pixel character like Legend of Dungeon, with a full 3D world with a locked perspective that will be like Castle Crashers. Now with the burgzergarcade arcade site above I can get the scripts and ai etc to do what I need, but I find pure 2D game tutorials and wonder if what I am doing will be right. I will attach two screen from the prototype I have built but what I did was take the 1st person gamer with camera etc and I moved the camera, stopped the mouse cursor input and it works. I then changed the graphic to a plane and put a png on it that was transparent. So it looks OK, but I need to see how to go forward with animation, etc and then after I do that I can apply burgzergarcade ai, scripts etc to get things moving.

Any suggestions on how to do the 2D sprite characters in our game (4 of us that are starting on this) so that they work like 2D characters and interact with enemies etc right? Or do I use a pure 2D how to?

Test game shots (yes the “knight” is floating and his png isn’t lining up his feat, so why I want to get this right):

9302-testgame1.jpg
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9303-testgame2.jpg
9303-testgame2.jpg1440×892 50.3 KB

I hate to start a discussion cause I have a feeling this has been done before and I love to look at how tos and go from there, but I keep seeing the 2D tutorial linked to unity site and it is gone. Thank you.

2

I am not sure I understood your question, are you asking for the best way to animate your character ? How to import your spritesheet ?

Well, for the latter, the answer is quite easy : the most precise import possible with unity is GUI with Point filtering.

To animate your character, you must find a way (or a tool) that changes your character texture at a certain rate. There are no native tools yet to easily do sprite animation in Unity. (OLD ANSWER : There are native sprite tools included with Unity now)

Tools like Simple Sprite or SpriteManager allow you to do that (you can find them on the asset store). Personally, I made my own sprite manager because I needed some very specific features. It works by changing the tiling and the offset of the texture in the material in order to display the correct image in the spritesheet.