Few questions before I delve into Unity

News & General Discussion
1

I want to start learning Unity, I have a few questions before I commit.
The games I am interested in developing are all mostly 2D, I’m wondering if with Unity I could create a top-down 2D game with multiplayer elements pretty much identical to this type of style

I guess my question is, Is top down 2D okay with unity? Would it still cut down the development time using Unity? I know Unity is a mostly 3D Engine and does side scroller stuff easily as well but I’m not sure about top down 2D, Would it be a hassle?

I’ve yet to learn any programming languages but will be subscribing to digital-tutors if I decide to commit to it.

I’m doing this as a hobby, I’ve been very interested for a long time and want to take the plunge.

2

Top-down 2D is no different than side-view 2D. Basically it’s all still 3D, but you just ignore one of the Ds.

–Eric

3

So what your saying is that it will still be 3D? I was leaning more towards sprites.

4

There are sprite management solutions like Orthello, which has a very feature complete free version. It has fantastic support and gets semi-regular updates, which is all very handy.

5

Nvm, Found that this was made with Unity, jaw just dropped.

anyone know what kind of animation style this is?

6

Everything is 3D, including sprites. They are 2D planes in a 3D world…as I said, you just ignore one of the Ds (but it’s always there…lurking…).

–Eric

7

Its just hand drawn sprites. It looks like they drawn the whole sprite and animate it manually - eg. drawn the whole sprite, onion skinning it and draw next frame…etc, instead of doing “hierarchical animation” style where you drawn only body parts and animate each body parts individually and programmatically. Something like Zombieville USA (which was one of the best selling Unity game):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvfVDczQXOY

And yes, there isn’t much to stop you from doing what you want to do, you can even buy solution straight from Asset Store to jump start your game. I would recommend just checking out the gallery section to find out exactly what you are looking for and maybe even ask the dev directly how they did it.

8

I appreciate the responses guys, I’m really excited.
I have extremely minimal programming knowledge, mostly just playing with source codes and want to get serious.

Any books or resources you recommend I read that gear me towards 2D? or just learn it from scratch?

9

making a good 2D System is very hard, since you have minimal programming knowledge, I recommend, you instead get a 2D Framework something like 2D Toolkit (I like that one) or ex2D.

10

Tylernocks is right. Unity is a 3D engine, not a 2D engine. And so its much easier to make a 3D game in Unity. There are also very good 2D solutions out there where you dont even need programming in the traditional way. Construct 2 for example. Or Multimedia Fusion 2. For traditional programming there`s stuff like Torque 2D and similar 2D solutions.

But you dont need to work with sprites when you want to make a 2dish game in Unity. Just use 3D characters, and limit the movement to 2 dimensions then. Thats called 2.5D.

11

I love the idea of Unity, being able to get plugins to help speed up development speed and ease it quite a lot.
I think I’ll get 2D Toolkit as Tyler suggested. After going through all the 2D engines I could find Unity seemed like it
had the versatility. Multiplayer in Torque 2D, Or Construct seems like a huge chore.