Hello everyone,
Me (scripter) and my internet buddy (pixelart) have decided to join forces and poor our ideas into a 2D platform game as a hobby project.
So far I’ve read the unity introduction and scripting basics. The programming seems pretty straight forward in unity.
We would like to make it a stand-alone 2D physics based game.
It seems Unity wasn’t optimised for 2D and brings a bundle of issues concerning the unused dimention.
My main question is the following:
Is it possible to create a tile based game world using prefabs (instances in flash) ?
I would make a huge array holding the world data and pre-load tiles “outside” the view of the player, and unload the rest, which is basically how mario 2D works.
If it’s not possible, I might try torque game builder, which is optimised for 2D but requires coding that is much less smooth than unity’s. Also found that one through answers.unity3D btw 
.
Secondary question:
Does the free unity version have locked features ?
welcome aboard.
yes, Unity can do what you are asking though arrays are probably not the best way to accomplish it. I would build your worlds stacking each piece as you need it and letting Unityscript sort out what pieces need to have what accessibility. So if you wanted a block that you could jump up and hit the bottom, you would need to create the block and create a OnCollisionEnter script that looked for the Normal of the hit… If it was straight down, then the hit would have come from the bottom.
Unity is full well capable of doing 2d and 3d physics. For 2d, you would need to lock the extra dimension’s movement. (i.e. rigidbody.velocity.z=0;) I would also take the time to limit the angular velocity as well.
As far as locked features… 99% of all locked features are the result of RenderTextures. This means shadows, reflections, and many special effects that can be accomplished only by taking a picture of something are locked in the free version. Other than that, you should be able to accomplish all of your goals without buying the license.
Since I’ll be asking alot of newbie questions, I’m guessing this thread will do for my next question. ( already been throught answers.unity3D 
)
We are creating a pixelart based game. but to save some time (hundrets of hours coloring pixels). We’ll use flash to animate our skeleton, and “render” the art movement in there. The -dummy- version is almost ready.
My next question is:
Can we use animated GIF or should we save it as seperate frames (PNG) to get the best result ?
And how can we implement this in Unity in the best possible way ? (I’ve seen the 2D tutorial which uses an animated 3D character sequence of movements. Then it calls certain frames of that animation. We would like to accomplish the same but with our 2D pixelart rendered by Flash. Or is this completelty the wrong way of approaching this ?)
Edit: Found this http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Creating%20Gameplay.html, should have looked harder 