I’m looking to create a game inspired by the puzzle mechanics in Golden Sun. Cube-based levels that involve pushing pillars around and jumping to cross gaps on multiple height levels. Below’s a screenshot that hopefully illustrates what I’m thinking about.
Another game that sorta does this (in a different setting) is Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker.
I’m an experienced C++/Rust developer, but have little experience with Unity. My question is: what would the best way be to go about this in Unity?
Golden Sun itself worked with a 2D tilemap with height-map data overlaid on top, creating an illusion of a 3d scene. I know Unity has support for multi-layered tile maps, but I’m not sure if I can take that far enough to get where I want. Ideally I’d like the game to reason about the 3d space, simulating moving platforms and water levels and such.
Would it be better to use Unity’s 3D feature set and use 2D billboards? I’m leaning towards a pixel-art aesthetic, if that influences the decision.
I realize this is a bit of an open-ended question, but I hope you experienced Uniteers might be able to guide me in a direction that doesn’t bite me back later on.
Whatever you do, keep the logic of pushing separated from the presentation, eg., don’t use physics in the traditional sense. Instead, track blocks, blockers, open areas, etc., and do the logic just like you’d do any other game (like Chips Challenge or what-have-you) and then have a separate presentation layer that shows it, either as 3D objects, 2D sprites, whatever.
Thanks! Not using the physics system sounds like a good way to go, this is way more a fake physics system indeed.
Don’t mind the ignorant question, but what would that separation look like in practice? Form what I understand colliders and meshes/sprites usually live on the same game objects in Unity/ECS’s. So…I separate the components out into different game objects?
Game objects with colliders for the block logic, and a tilemap for the presentation? Separate game objects for the pillars?
The difficult part is that the presentation also needs to be aware of any height difference, so that it can draw the player behind walls and bridges and things.
