Alumnia Knights is a fantasy RPG built in Unity by Bouchier Tristan (known as Sheyn) — a sprawling, lore-heavy world where players join a cast of Knights to seal rifts, battle monsters, and push back the influence of Outer Gods. The game features a roster of distinct playable characters across multiple roles: Dealer, Tank, Healer — each with their own personality, abilities, and animations.
Available on PC, Android, WebGL, and Linux, with support for six languages, Alumnia Knights is an ambitious undertaking for a single developer. And at the center of it all is a battle system that needed to feel alive.
That's where Ludo.ai came in.
The Problem: Every Character Needs to Move
Alumnia Knights isn't a game where characters stand still. Its battle system is built around animated sprites: characters that swing, cast, idle, and react in real time. Every single character in the game needs a full set of sprite animations to function.
For a solo developer, that's a production challenge with no clean solution. Hand-animating a full roster of characters across multiple animation states is the kind of work that can consume an entire development cycle before the actual game design gets attention.
Bouchier needed a pipeline that would let him generate quality animations quickly, keep them consistent across the roster, and integrate them cleanly into Unity.
The Solution: Every Character Animation, Made with Ludo
Bouchier's approach was direct: use Ludo.ai for every character spritesheet in the game.
"For the battle system, every single character's spritesheets on my game were made with Ludo.ai. Meaning that every character animation and movements — so basically what makes the game feel alive — were made with Ludo."
— Sheyn (Bouchier Tristan), Developer, Alumnia Knights
Not some characters. Not a subset of animations. Every one.
This wasn't a shortcut for a single bottleneck. It became the foundation of the entire battle system's visual production.
What Made It Work
Bouchier landed on Ludo.ai for a specific set of reasons, each one addressing a real constraint of solo game development.
Iteration speed. Getting to a usable result didn't require burning through dozens of attempts:
"I can have very decent results in as less as 2-3 prompts per animation."
— Sheyn (Bouchier Tristan)
That kind of turnaround is enough to stay in a creative flow without getting stuck in refinement loops. Across a full character roster, it adds up fast.
Automatic resize on export. Ludo can automatically resize spritesheets on export so every character comes out at the same dimensions. In a game like Alumnia Knights, with a varied roster spanning human knights, large enemies, and creatures, keeping consistent frame sizes is essential for clean Unity integration. This happened automatically, without extra steps.
Resolution flexibility. The ability to export at different resolutions gave Bouchier control over the final look of each character, all within the same tool.
Automatic background removal. Sprites need clean transparent backgrounds to work in-engine. Ludo handled this automatically, eliminating a manual step that would otherwise have to happen for every frame of every animation.
The result: a pipeline where generating a new character animation meant uploading, prompting, and exporting — not hours of cleanup work in external software.
From Ludo to Unity
This clip shows Emilie's attack animation open in Unity's Animation editor. The sprite itself was generated in Ludo; what Bouchier is building here is the layered combat effect on top: sword rotation, scale, anchored position, and a multi-stage VFX sequence all keyed against the base sprite animation. The Ludo-generated spritesheet is the foundation. The engine handles the rest.
It's a clear picture of how the two tools divide the work: Ludo produces the character motion, Unity handles the combat feel.
Beyond the Pipeline
Bouchier also noted two things that don't show up in a technical feature list but matter in practice: the UI and the community.
"The UI of the Ludo.ai website is pretty and intuitive. And the Discord support really is awesome."
— Sheyn (Bouchier Tristan)
For a solo developer, time spent figuring out a tool is time not spent building the game. An interface that doesn't require a learning curve, and a support channel that's actually responsive, are real parts of what makes a tool viable day to day.
Play Alumnia Knights
Alumnia Knights is actively in development and playable now. It's available for free (name your own price) on itch.io, with releases on PC, Android, Linux, and WebGL.
- Play or download: sheyne.itch.io/alumnia-knights
- Play in browser: WebGL version
- Follow development: Twitter/X · Discord · Patreon
Alumnia Knights is developed by Bouchier Tristan (Sheyn). All character sprite animations shown in the game's battle system were created using Ludo.ai.
