Quick example of how we are animating the water in Frontier Fugitive using a custom Unity URP 2d shader.

We simply overlay the water on the background and use our shader to animate the water ripples as you can see in the video. Then we overlay rocks and anything else we want shown above the water ripple in z sorting order.

Really happy with how this turned out and it is quite inexpensive compared to animating a sprite of that size with a number of frames.