Day 3 Progress
Since I have a non-game dev job my time spent on the project is limited a bunch on the weekdays, but that doesn't mean I haven't made any progress. First up, the finished (for now) main player sprite with Left/Right animations. I added Benjamin's little trick mentioned above regarding making the actual sprite a bit smaller during the walk cycle (though looking at Home it might be opposite, getting larger as the character steps):
Once that was all done the engine just worked since I had it all hooked up before finishing the sprites, I just had to update the animations in Unity. That lead to the next necessary fix which was to update the transform movement call. Initially I was using a Transform.Translate function which causes some jittery issues when walking against a collider so I updated this to be physics based using force.
Finally I did one more little art test by making a night stand with a lamp on it:
Combined with a point light and the flickering 'light aura' gives it a neat little look when it appears from off screen:
A 'stretch feature' of this lamp would be to allow the player to turn off the light with the interact key rather than prompting them with a box; not a difficult thing to add at all but I just haven't done it yet. Also bumped up the general ambient light a little so it isn't pitch black on the edges of the screen, might up it a bit more.
One thing I am going to need to consider going forward is the perspective combined with the colliders on objects. Since something like the Bed sits on one layer the Player can either be in front or behind, but not dynamically either based on position without a bunch of code (for example if you walk to the bottom of the Bed the Player head covers it, but with that same layer the Player feet cover the top of the the bed). Another possible solution would be to split the bed into 2 sprites and layer them appropriately, but that might end up getting messy with placement in Unity since I'm not using a grid snap. Onward!