Struggles with random sprites

Hi everyone, Shawn here with another update on The Village! Today, I want to dive into a tough roadblock that I had to overcome. Figuring out how to generate unique villager sprites dynamically.

The Plan: Dynamic Villagers

One of the features of the Modern Interiors asset pack is its fantastic character creator. You can pick traits like skin colour, clothing, eyes, hair, and accessories, and it will generate a sprite sheet for your character. Perfect for my game, right? But I didn’t want to manually create every villager. Instead, I needed to generate characters randomly in code to populate my village with a diverse cast. 

The Problem: Prefab Instancing Woes

At first, I managed to combine the sprites in code and apply them to my prefab. Great! Except... every instance of the prefab updated with the same sprite. My “unique” villagers were clones of each other, which was not the vibe I was going for.

I spent days trying different approaches to get each prefab to reference a unique sprite sheet. No matter what I tried, the core issue was that the Sprite Renderer used by the Animator was sharing the sprite across all prefabs.

The Solution: Sprite Library Asset to the Rescue

After a lot of digging, I discovered Unity’s Sprite Library Asset from the 2D Animation package. One of its use cases is using the same animation rig for different sprites, which sounded perfect for my problem.

Here’s what I did:

1. Re-rigged My Animations I set up the villager animations to work with the Sprite Library system. This required going back and changing the keys to point to the sprite reference in the library instead of just a sprite.
2. Populated the Sprite Library I generated the sprite sheet dynamically, sliced it in code, and assigned each part to the library. To make this work, I had to ensure the order and naming of the sprites matched the original library setup.
3. Created Overrides Per Villager Each villager instance now references the same animation rig but uses its own set of sprites via the Sprite Library. This allows for unique appearances without duplicating animation setups.

The Result: Unique Villagers!

After a lot of trial and error, I now have a system where each villager can have a unique sprite sheet, generated and applied dynamically, without affecting other instances. They still share the same animation rig, keeping things efficient. It's not perfect. I wrote some code to skip empty slices from the sprite sheet, but a beard for example in the position where a sprite would be facing up was an empty space, since you can't see a beard when the sprite is facing up. So some of the parts are not using the right index resulting in my beards vanishing on some frames.

Lessons Learned

This challenge pushed me to learn more about Unity’s 2D Animation tools and think creatively about prefab instancing. While it was frustrating at times, I’m really proud of the result. My villagers now feel truly unique, and I can easily scale this system as the game grows. 

When I create my own sprites in the future, I can make sure they have a specific layout and naming convention to make this process more automation friendly.

Next up, I’ll be diving deeper into AI behavior, so these unique villagers can start exploring the bar and interacting with their environment. Thanks for reading,! 🌈