Hi,
Does anyone have any idea how they went about making 2d assets in Paper moon? (http://blurst.com/paper-moon/) I attempted to use planes, but obviously physics don't work correctly.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
Are you talking about the static objects (ground and walls etc) or the moving objects that can push the player and enemies out of the stage?
If you're talking about the static objects:
Planes should work just fine as long as they're facing the right way. Planes are normally one-sided and if an object approaches it from the inner surface direction, it can pass right through. From the outer surface the plane should be solid though and have other objects collide properly with it (if it has a collider).
If you're talking about the pushing objects:
If you want to use real collision physics, be sure to make your objects have actual volume and make them as thick as you can without them behaving wrong. If they're very thin and move fast, it might not work correctly.
However, I suspect than in Paper Moon there's large triggers around those things that you can push back and forth, and when an object enters those triggers a script applies a force the target object or similar and make it be thrown away that way rather than with normal collision physics. This would work well for situations where things are happening so fast that you can't see if the collision behaves 100% correctly anyway.
I don't know about the specifics of how they did it in paper moon, but basically for 2d games you can use whatever type of geometry you like to create the visual elements (planes, custom meshes etc), and then you should treat your collision objects as separate items.
Generally you'd want to use box colliders for flat surfaces, and you might want to use mesh colliders in the shape of extruded 2d shapes for surfaces which need more detail such as curved surfaces.
Also check out a general search of this site for questions tagged 2D, and you might be interested to have a look at Unity's 2D Gameplay Tutorial.
As people already said, I also think it's probably using planes and colliders with triggers (and lots of scripting) and maybe some rigidbodies or maybe none at all (for your physics concern). Get the tutorial already mentioned by Duck and try to replace all meshes with planes and you'll have a very similar effect.
PS: dam it would be much easier if we could link to unity stuff using regular wiki code!