thanks tylR for the encouraging words! And you were still able to beat the boss after those 3 min, right? Lol. I did consider reloading the entire scene, but since it's only 1 scene, there really wasn't a good spot for me to add another scene and still have the kind of effect I was going for (especially since I wanted that transition effect from title screen to the level to be smooth).
Using a skeleton was my first goal with my characters, but when I opened the sprite editor and changed to skinning editor, everything dissappeared (the sprite was a single sprite), then when I changed it to multiple sprite, I was only able to make a bone on one sprite at a time and I didn't know how to connect them together. I think it got too late, so I just stuck with animating each body part in the animator.
Thanks for your great suggestions! If you know how to add bones to a single sprite and still have the body parts be on different layers, Id love to hear how to do it! Thanks for playing!