When making 2D atack animations with a sword, should i draw the sword in the spritesheet, or should i add the sword later in Unity? Just want some feedback
Depends if you want to be able to upgrade or change weapons I guess. If the visuals of the weapon is the same trough the whole game, you might as well have it in the same sprite, easier to animate.
As egil stated above - it depends on your intended goal. To add to that, it also depends on the animation method you’re using. If your doing more straight-up traditional sprite-based animations (such as pixel art), unity (specifically mechanim) is limited in its ability to handle those. If you’re doing bone/joint based animations, you’ll have more flexibility.
If you’re just starting an trying to decide on a method - i’d suggest joint-based since out-of-the-box, they’re friendlier in unity - at least in a technical sense.
So to answer your question - if you’re doing joint based and want to do weapon swaps, make the weapon a seperate object. If you’re doing traditional 2D and DONT want weapon swaps - make it attached. If you’re doing traditional and want weapon/armor/etc swaps - be prepared for a giant hassle if you want to use mechanim and no answer is much easier than the other.
Shameless Self Plug - If you’re doing pixel characters and want easy swaps, I’ve got an asset called Sprite Swapper on the store that was made for that. I’ve also got a custom animator Pixel Animator in the approval process now that allows multi-layered 2D animations.