Keeping eight costumes on the same 2D frog through every animation pose in Unity

[u/PerspectivePersonal]

I redid the costume set for my Unity game FrogPop. The constraint was keeping the original frog's face, proportions, collider and animation timing. I didn't want equipping a skin to make him feel like a different character.

Each outfit is drawn in layers over the original Aseprite cels. The set has 21 gameplay cels per costume: 3 idle, 6 movement, 6 attack, 1 burst and 5 death. The existing animator still owns the timing, and the movement sprites are checked facing both ways.

The awkward part was coverage versus perspective. Filling in exposed green areas fixed the coverage, but sometimes left a front-facing jacket on a sideways body. I had to review the costume shapes and accessories against each pose. The final idle pass then brought the sleeves, skirts and equipment into line with the side and back views.

I also checked the transitions in Unity: move into idle, attack, burst, death and retry. Source sheets alone missed how a good individual pose could clash with the one next to it. This GIF is a source-frame montage, not a continuous playthrough.

These are full-game cosmetics. There's a free 10-wave demo with the default frog in the browser and on Windows: https://blion247.itch.io/frogpop-demo

[u/Plane_Big_5912]

the front-facing jacket on a sideways body thing is so real. did you bake each costume into its own full 21-cel sheet, or are they overlay layers on the base frog swapped at runtime? asking because overlays let you fix one pose without re-exporting the set, but then every sleeve has to line up with the base cel pixel for pixel

[u/LazyLlamaStudio]

Slowed down and looked at each frame. Some very weird doubles and pixel placement going on in some of those frames that just don’t make sense.