As an indie developer, who is good at coding or at least has the right skillset to program the game logic, you’re already ahead of the game. Creating animations for 3D or 2D characters can seem like a whole other skillset, but with the right tools and workflow, it’s totally manageable—even solo.

Making a game is not simple, it takes creativity, passion, dedication and most importantly Skills! But, considering normal circumstances, one person is not expected to have all the skills that is relevant to game planning, level design, UI/UX, Sound design, Animations, Models etc. It’s simply too much and generally requires a team to do so, but if you are a solo indie developer working on a project, luckily you still can accomplish a lot of related task and within the required time. Let me explain you how. Here is the step by step process, of how you can have animated 2D or 3D characters within your game :

1. 2D Character Animations

Option A: Use pre-made character & animation packs
This is the fastest approach, where all you have to do is just visit an online marketplace and look for a suitable 2d characters which has whatever presets that you require. All you have to do is purchase the asset pack, include it in your project and you are done!

Although, there are many such online assets providers, but few of them are trusted and contains premium or even free assets :

• Craftpix
• Unity Asset Store
• Kenny Assets
• Itch.io

Option B: Manual Sprite Sheet Animation
In this method, you have more control over how your character looks and animates, but this method comes at a cost of a learning curve, as the tools involved here needs basic operational learning as well as creating assets essentially needs practice and time. Some of the industry standard tool to create high quality animated sprites are :

• Aseprite, Piskel, Photoshop: For creating pixel art or frame-by-frame sprites.
• TexturePacker: Optimize sprite sheets.

Option C: Skeletal Animation (Efficient & Modern)
This method is a different approach altogether but the results can be much smoother and polished if you want that type of look and feel. In this method, rather than creating individual sprites at every frame, you create the sprite once, add bones much like in our human body to attach different part of the sprites and then use the timeline to create smooth animations. Some of the popular tools are listed as below :

• Spine (paid, very popular)
• DragonBones (free)
• Godot’s 2D Skeletons
• Unity 2D Animation Package

Option D: Procedural Animation via Code
If you are comfortable in creating advance level codes, then this option is also available for you where you can create a sprite once having all parts of the sprites different and using the code, you can animate them however you want. However, please note, this can take a lot of time and has no direct method or way, the creation process takes a lot of experiments and fixes to smooth out and achieve the desired result.

2. 3D Character Animations

Like mentioned above, for 3d animations and characters as well we have a very similar options which are mention as like below :

Option A: Use premade characters and animations (Fastest)
This approach is the easiest and fastest as all you have to do is visit an online marketplace, purchase your desired characters along with animations, integrate in your project and you are done! Few of the trusted sites and process that I follow is mentioned below :

• Mixamo – One stop portal to download free characters and wide variety of animations.
• Unity Asset Store
• Itch.io
• Kenny Assets

Option B: Use tools to animate yourself
If you do not want to use a generic/publicly available character assets and want to design your own which fits the needs of your game, then you can go for this option. Here are few tools, which you can use to create and animate your own characters :

• Blender
• Autodesk Maya
• Cinema 4D

I hope this guide helped you to find you path and choose correctly if you need 2D or 3D characters for your game.