Been finally working on the player character.

On the plus side, I like the complexity of its... or maybe his? - shape, if that makes sense, and I enjoyed painting the texture. Sorry, I don't know at the moment how to take a good close-up image in Unity. Here is the model in Blender.

On the minus side, once again without clear concept art from the start I've found it hard to fit the character with the rest of the level, especially size- and perspective-wise. When I put the camera at the distance where it would make sense for the gameplay, the character will indeed be like a flea on the screen. Also color-wise. I thought that the original would stand out garishly, so I desaturated it in Unity. Now it gets lost among the background.

There's also the movement, and a frustrating aspect to the way I implemented it. Namely, I'm simulating projectile motion: I set the jump distance and duration, plus launch angle in the inspector, then it calculates launch speed. The problem is that... well, apart that this seems maybe like overkill (although at the same time the most natural solution)... There's rounding errors. So I think it drifts by a small amount with each jump, while it should land smack in the middle of each row. Anyway, I've decided for the moment that if I don't make each level too big it shouldn't be a problem.

Finally, the animations. As I suspected, that's pretty much my favorite part of the process (although maybe that's just because there's so few of them right now, who knows). In the end I went without a launching and landing animation and just transitioned between idle and in the air. Otherwise I couldn't make the blending work responsively, if that makes sense. But this introduces some jerkiness if you jump in very quick succession, and I'm not sure how to solve that. Of course, here there's also some "cleverness" involved, and maybe I'll be clever enough in the future to avoid it.