Animated 2D Characters in 2025

It is 2025 now, and I came far with my MageGame. It is time to give some overview which characters are existing. This post will focus on content, and hence, not contain code.

This is now a list of so far animated characters in my game. The count is 71. Excluded are those characters who are just planned yet, or who are un-animated (pose-only) background characters.

In this process, my editor widget, the Animation Helper™, was a big help. It heavily reduced development time and simplified the process.

Design Choices

When looking at the character graphics, you might think, they are bit simple and plain… and yes, I won’t argue with that. Let me tell (or write) you, it is a design choice. The reasons is: The characters are small and hence need less details. Additionally, I got to animate them by moving vertices manually – another reasons to keep details low. Who am I? I am not AI! There might be one exception: That is the paper cut-style models. I use this style for bigger characters. There, a detail frequency that low within a bigger sprite texture did not look well. I tried it. I’m not a really picky in the visual sense. But big flat shapes wihtout details – that just does not work for me.

Now some words to the workflow: I made the graphics with the vector program Adobe Illustrator, designed the characters and arranged the sprite sheets there, then imported the sheets into Unity and made all these adjustments to create characters that now live in the game and make it what it is. And that is something, I always dreamed of. It is a beautiful thing to create and vivify a fantasy world.

But now, see for yourself: