From Prototype to Pretty — Swapping Assets & Sprites

How do I change out the placeholder sprites on my Game Objects?

Objective: Explain how to remove placeholder assets with new art to improve the visuals of your game.

Alright! We are fast tracking along here and have finished implementing the core features and decided that the prototype should be converted into a full game. I’ve already added the assets I’m going to use by dragging them into a “Sprites” folder. Let’s start by adding a new background to the scene.

Now I just need to make some new “Sorting Layers” to keep the 2D Sprites from sitting on top of each other in weird ways.

It’s important to list these layers with the furthest away from the player at the top, and the closest to the player at the bottom. For example, the background should be rendered first, followed by gameplay elements such as the player, and lastly UI or HUD on top.

Now just set the Image to the new “Background” Layer.

I also have some “Clouds” that I want to have move on top of the background creating a “parallax” effect. But we’ll cover that later.

Now to adjust the Sprite on the Player, Enemy, Mine, and Bullet objects.

I also need to adjust the collider for each considering they all have a new size and shape. For this I’ll need to delete the collider on them already and replace with a more accurate shape as well as change the size or position to fit. (Don’t forget to check “Is Trigger” for each new collider as well.)

And finally, don’t forget to apply any changes made to the prefabs using the “Overrides” dropdown.

That’s it! Now everything looks a whole lot more professional! In the next article we’ll be talking about the adjustments we need to make in the code to account for the new sprites.

You can now play this game on itch.io! I’ll try to keep it updated as I work on it and add new features or tweak existing ones.

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