When I am learning an unfamiliar creative tool, I usually get farther by making a sequence of narrow, visible experiments than by trying to design the final piece up front. These four clips capture that process with Unity Timeline while the feature was still new.
Why I made this
Timeline introduced a different way to think about animation, sequencing, and cinematic work inside Unity. I needed a practical mental model for how characters, animation clips, and shots could be assembled—and whether the result would survive the trip to a browser build.
A large tutorial would have been the wrong format while I was still discovering the workflow. The immediate need was a fast feedback loop: try one idea, render the result, identify the next useful question, and build on what worked.
What I did
I started with Mixamo characters and animations, using Timeline to arrange a short dance sequence. That first test isolated the basic sequencing problem without adding narrative or combat logic.
The next day I reduced the idea even further: two skeleton shades fighting for seven seconds. Once that worked, I expanded the same setup into a thirty-one-second sequence instead of throwing the experiment away and starting over.
Four days later I used the accumulated understanding to create ‘entrance to the chamber,’ a one-minute-and-twenty-nine-second scene. I also exported it as HTML5 and published the build on itch.io, testing the work in the delivery context rather than stopping at the Unity editor.
I preserved the intermediate clips because they make the progression legible. You can see the scope grow from animation sequencing to a more complete cinematic and browser deliverable.
A note on the archive
These experiments were recorded in September 2017 while Unity Timeline and browser-publishing workflows were substantially different from their current forms. Treat the interfaces and export path as historical, and use current Unity documentation for implementation guidance.
The clips contain little or no spoken instruction. They’re here because they capture the experiments as they happened: try something small, see what works, and let that result suggest the next test.