Day 4:
I added the main character sprite and animations!
Again the actual spriting is from RPG Maker free assets, but to actually use the sprites and get them animating to follow along with player movement developed before, all had to be done in Unity. The tavern owner in The Red Dragon Inn (the board game this RPG is loosely inspired by) has a young wench delivering all of the drinks. But I wasn't really satisfied with the art for younger characters, so instead I'm settling (for now) on an old yet wisened hag. Having already lived most of her life, it makes a little more sense why she would be setting up a tavern isolated from urban society. And although she isn't the most natural fighter, she is wise and observant enough to absorb all the knowledge fellow travelers share with her, thus improving her combat skills as the game progresses.
I had basic experience before with Unity's Animator Controller system. One problem where I got stuck for a while was that after I play the animation to move in a certain direction, at the end of the animation the sprite would always revert to the downward-facing default sprite. This would occur even if I used an animation event to manually change the sprite renderer to display a different sprite at the end of the animation. The end fix: a property of my default idle state called Write Defaults: this would automatically revert to the state before the animation, which is why me trying to use animation events was not working. Unchecking Write Defaults worked perfectly in my sprite maintaining their directionality after playing the animation.