July 2026 – Author Blog for A.M. Kuska

This week I was able to write the code to get my character animated. Now the character has an animation sequence to run depending on which direction it goes. Unfortunately, sometimes it uses the wrong sequence and I’m not sure why. Here’s a fun video of it doing its thing:

I will report when I figure out what is wrong and why. In the mean time, I’m leaving this here so Older Smarter Self can have a laugh at my first efforts at trying to make something. I won’t give up though. Just got to keep trying!

A note from Older Smarter Self just a few days later: turns out I had a 0 and a 1 swapped in the code and this was the cause of all of my sorrows. I can’t believe something that small could throw so much into chaos. It didn’t show as an error because there was no error. I was telling the computer which sprites to pull and it believed me. >.<

This past month saw a number of major goals met in my game. I finished the sprite sheet for the character, learned how to paint the tile sets I made into a “scene” in Unity, and successfully got the character to walk around on it. The coding ended up being the easiest part of the entire process, as I have spent a lot of time practicing coding but not as much time learning Unity.

As of right now, the character is unanimated. She faces you the whole time while the character moves. I ran into an issue with Unity where it kept saying my animation (which didn’t yet exist) was ‘read-only’ and there was no button like the tutorials showed. I eventually figured out how to create animation sequences for each direction. Next weeks goal will be to come up with a code that tells the game which animation sequence to use depending on which direction you’re going.

After that, I’m at a bit of a cross-roads. The general recommendation is you work on each area until it’s 90% done and then move on to the next area. I agree with this, but I’m not sure if I should finish doing the whole area with the really really rough approach and then refine, or if I should refine the sprite and background before moving on.

There’s such a lot to be done, not really sure what is best.

Dev Log # 5 – Animation!

Dev Log #4 – Sprite Successful!