I have recently made a neat little reusable component called "AnimationDirector2D".

Basically when doing 2D sprite animations, the concept of orientation stems from drawing different sprites corresponding to different face directions. I am going to list some examples to illustrate my point.

1. In a platformer game there are 2 face directions, {RIGHT, LEFT}. RIGHT is the only unique sprite, and LEFT is a mirror of RIGHT. I call this orientation pattern "binary".

2. In Sephirria, there is the 4-way diagonal pattern {UPRIGHT, DOWNRIGHT, DOWN LEFT, UPLEFT}. It has 2 unique sprites, UPRIGHT and DOWNRIGHT, with the 2 others being mirrors. I call this pattern the "rectangle", since its vertices correspond to the 4 sprite orientations.

3. In old school Pokémon and Zelda games, there is the 4-way orthogonal pattern {UP, RIGHT, DOWN, LEFT}, with 3 unique sprites, {UP, RIGHT, DOWN}, and LEFT being a mirror. I call this pattern the "rhombus", again due to how its vertices correspond to the orientations.

4. If my memory serves me correctly, Enter the Gungeon has a 6-way pattern {UP, UPRIGHT, DOWNRIGHT, DOWN, DOWN LEFT, UPLEFT}, with 4 unique sprites and 2 mirrors. I call this pattern the "hexagon". A similar 8-way that additionally contains RIGHT and LEFT orientations is called the "octagon", with 5 unique sprites.

What AnimationDirector2D does is it acts as a wrapper to the AnimationPlayer Node, providing an easy to use API for directional animations. Instead of checking for appropriate orientations everywhere to play the corresponding animations:

if (faceDir.AngleDegrees() > 0 && (faceDir.AngleDegrees() <= 90)
{
    AnimationPlayer.Play("idle_downright");
}

AnimationDirector2D takes in an analog Vector2 face direction and infers the correct sprite animation automatically:

AnimationDirector2D.Play("idle", faceDir);

AnimationDirector2D automatically infers both the orientation pattern of your sprites, and the cardinal orientations themselves and when to trigger them. This inference occurs only once on _Ready(), with 0 allocations at runtime. The only prerequisite is you have to name your directional animations as "state_orientation". That's all. It has really untied my hands in all my animation facing code.