Love all the little environmental movement like flag, grass & water reacting to the wind.
Damn, the animations of the units are great. You have some serious talent in Animation.
I since release games from big studio with much weaker walk animations. I like also there is a flag where the unit walks to.
Thanks! Yeah, I try to make the world feel alive. That's why each unit has a nice idle animation, so when there are a few units on screen, even when they aren't doing anything, it still adds to the scene. The grass is Unity's built in grass, but I modified it a bit. The water is from an asset I bought, mainly because it is a shader, and I have no experience with building animated shaders.
I made the flag in Modo. It is actually pre-rendered. I just rendered the animation (with physics soft bodies stuff) and saved the best frames that looped well. Then, converted that into a sprite sheet and brought into Unity. This saves me from having to rely on actual cloth physics in Unity, although if I build a king, he will need it for his cape. In a previous video, I showed a cape (I think I did anyway).
I find animation comes fairly natural to me. I think it is because of all the drawings I've done over the years "posing" characters. For example, to draw two characters fighting you have to pose them to give the effect you want (swinging hard, getting hit, whatever), and animation is just a series of poses chained together.
The animations that require two hands are much harder (two handed sword, bow, etc.) because each hand has to be able to reach the weapon in all poses. I just wish I had more time to do the animations. Being a solo dev means I have to spend time doing everything and can't really focus as much.
I added a flag where the units walk to because an arrow or icon on the ground can get hidden behind scenery (buried in grass, behind a wall, etc.). I wanted something that was easy to see, and fit with the game's overall theme.
I'm going to do a few more characters this week, then ramp up the enemy A.I. so I can get some testing/tweaking done and see how the characters are doing.
It looks like your game is coming along too.