So I was getting bored and I tried my hand at 2D game, like with sprite sheets, and I found myself incapable of doing anything remotely borderline noobish. So is 2D game creation more difficult, or just more tedious? Thoughts?
Whatever it is one happens to be working on at the moment tends to be the most difficult and tedious thing. At least this is my experience ;D
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It depends on the game being made and whether I have to do my own artwork. It likely doesn’t help any that Unity doesn’t really have much of anything to really assist with the process of developing 2D games.
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I thought unity was one of the best tools for 2D mobile stuff? Or am I wrong.
If you don’t mind having to build or buy a proper map editor for your game. 
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Yeah despite how much I love the old SNES 2D games, I couldn’t have the patients to sit there and make one.
I find Pixel Art (detailed Pixel Art) much more harder than extruding some polygons and applying a smooth modifier, or Sculpting inside ZBrush, much more easier lol…
Then go take photos of real stuff, and convert it to a seamless texture, much easier than sitting there trying to pixel by pixel make something look good, espically like a 64 x 128 Sprite, good lord, imagin making like a 20 frame animation of everything moving with that many pixels (8192) pixels. I feel bad for Duke Nukem devs lol.
Another insanely daft question, but do you fix the character and move the background, or move the character and fix the background?
I do neither, if I do end up doing a sprite, I just leave the background transparent and paint on it that way… Not sure if that’s the proper way to do it, but that’s what I do personally. But I don’t make very many 2D things.
Sorry bro, I don’t get what you mean. Do you have a screenshot or something.
I figured you were talking about Animating.
If you were, then Transparency = no background, so the frames of animation you make, all you do is change the pixels of the character not fix character fix background, all you do is put the pixels where you want and done.
But then again, I’m still not entirely sure what you meant by it now sense you said that lol.
3d games are much more difficult.
However, in 2d games you might have more animation work, and that animation work might have higher art requirements.
For example…
This is character’s concept art (taken from final fantasy 6 concept art gallery):
Here’s the character (on the top right):
You need to be able to draw even for pixelart.
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I think a lot of people think 2D games are easier to make than 3D games just because they are… well 2D and not 3D. In my own experience having dabbled in 3D many years ago and again very recently and having done a lot of 2D work… I think 2D is no simpler to make than 3D and in some ways is more work. Particulary the graphics being drawn frame by frame using onion skinning or whatever. Don’t take this post the wrong way… 3D is a lot of work as well. And in some ways can also be more than 2D. They each have pros and cons as far as development goes.
Tools always make a huge difference whether 2D or 3D. I personally don’t plan on using Unity for any more 2D projects. I think it makes it even more tedious than it normally is. However, for 3D I think is a very smart choice.
Beyond the direct comparison of workloads there is also the aspect that you can make the same basic game in 2D and 3D and even if everything is the same as far as mechanics, scoring and so forth the 3D version may be a bit more immersive or look like it is a bigger accomplishment so in order to get the same attention you may need to do more work on the 2D version jazzing it up a bit here or there.
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Thanks for the insight garbenjamin! I must admit I haven’t spent too long on it, but was dis-secting some of the existing 2d games like hippocoder’s other brothers etc and some of your own, and was thinking hot damnnn there’s a shit tonne of work involved there. I began to explore 2.5D styles when I first started my noob to pro in a week thread, and I thought it might seem easier, at least avoids too much pixel pushing for a similar-ish feel. I wanted to explore it a bit more because I like the whole retro thing, but it is interesting how you guys talk about 3rd party tools, I’ve never used anything of such, kinda just used to banging out my own levels and rigs inside blender.
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Regarding comparison of workloads.
Scenario 1.
Problem. “Character needs to look up or aim at something”
3D: Rotate few bone. Can be done procedurally.
2D: Draw several animation frames, fully coloring them.
Scenario 2:
Problem: Character needs to suddenly transform into monster, growing wings, fangs, and ripping clothes in the process.
2D: Draw several frames.
3D: Produce complex construct of multiple meshes, lots of particle effects, and other VFX woodoo. Result may still look subpar compared to 2D and will take longer.
Also, it is hard to replicate 2D look in 3d game.
Very few games managed to do that successfully.
On of the examples is Guilty Gear Xrd Sign
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YES!!! I’m working on a simple one right now and man i’m walking up the walls here. I’m kinda getting the grips now tho
It’s also a matter of your own skills.
There are quite a lot people that are be able to model a decent house in a 3D application, but can not draw a house with proper shading and perspective on a sheet of paper.
3D does some things, you don’t need to care about. Like perspective and lighting. But it requires a lot technical knowledge.
And as mentioned, 3D can be less time consuming. Doing hand drawn animation frame by frame, can take a lot of time (depending how detailed your drawings are).
If you have your 3D-character done with a complete rig, you can animate it way faster.
That’s the reason why some games like Clash of Clans, have rendered their sprites in 3D, rather than drawn by hand.
Personally I prefer 2D, because it is timeless and with 3D comes a bunch of new issues, like getting the look right, or being dependent on some graphical features (GI, shaders, post fx etc.)
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Once when I was digging into the person behind our friendly neighborhood @hippocoder -man I came across The Other Brothers website and watched a vid of the game. Looks great to me but unfortunately it was only available for iPhone and I game on PC and consoles. Supposed to be coming for Windows at some point but who knows when. You’d think they’d want to take my money but for some reason they don’t seem to want it. 
Anyway, I agree it looks like good fun with a lot of class & personality and you can tell a good amount of work went into it. Reminds me of the older games (the great ones I mean!).
I fancy giving it TLC but it’s not the primary focus at the moment… 
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I didn’t see this mentioned above, so I will point out that there are some cool ways to leverage Unity’s animation system in 2D as well: you can break your character into pieces, parent them together and use an animation to drive them to do what you want.
The simplest thing I can think of here is a skull with a detachable lower jaw. That way you can get away with far less 2D sprite drawing, and put the pre-drawn pieces together in very interesting ways.
Nah, a bunch of old 2D games did stuff like that procedurally (e.g. Abuse) and it’s easy enough to make separate parts and use bones to animate them (Zombieville USA if you want a Unity example). Incorporating 3D techniques to make 2D art is ancient, such as the use of pre-rendered graphics to make sprites in Xevious in the early '80s.
–Eric
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