Basic questions

Unity Engine
1

I’ve worked for many years as a Flash developer, I’ve also just started to do some iOS coding, and now I’m looking into using Unity but I don’t understand some of the basic structural setups of the how’s and why’s of using Unity.

I’m interested in creating 2D games. Most likely only for the mobile platforms for now. I would need to be able to have leaderboards, in games ads, IAP’s, and hopefully be able to save data to an online database (commercial or otherwise). It would be great to have a 2D physics engine, and multiplayer options if needed.

I was planning on using Matt Rix’s Futile libraries but I just read that doesn’t have physics.

So onto my questions…

  • What are my best paths to take taking into account my above criteria?
  • If you are just coding 2D games, how does the Unity editor come into the workflow? if at all?
  • You can design levels with the editor? if that’s true, would that work with 2D games? then how do you save out each level, so the code can load them in when needed?
  • How do you set up a UI? is this something done outside of the editor? or inside of the editor?
  • How do you do preloading of assets?

Thanks for any advice.

2

If you just purely want to code 2d use something else done that’s it just use something else if its 2.5D use unity.
there are scripts for 2d on asset store to make unity tile based so that’s a option.
you design each level in the editor and add it to the build list for the game build you save scene scenes are levels and in java and c# its application.load which can be found in documentation.
GUI texture and GUI text = UI unless you have pro and autodesk scaleform and it is done in editor and by code its weird its a bit of a what ever you want situation but to do a on click or enable disable its code.
and preloading i am not qualified even to explain how as i haven’t coded it before:(

if its purely 2D there re plenty of tutorials on YouTube and in the documentation which will teach you how to use sprite batches etc but not many people have used unity for purely 2D games there is usually always a 3rd dimension even if the player only sees from a 2d perspective

3

Thanks for the info. Anyone else with advice?