Single Room 2D Environment, Plugin and Dev Questions

Unity Engine
1

After playing “Fiz” on Android, I was inspired to create a similarly styled game focused on an entirely different concept. I’m in the planning/learning stages right now.

I’ve watched a ridiculous number of videos and am working through some very basic 2D tutorials. I’ve spent hours on these forums and looked at a huge number of posts. I feel like it is coming together in my mind, but I’m still a long ways off.

The main game screen will focus on one 2D room (much like Fiz is based around a single room representing a brewery). I plan to incorporate an action menu on the right side of the screen, taking up 1/6th of the total space. The rest of the space will be populated by several sprites representing the room, the player, and the NPC’s that he hires. There will be minimal movement, none of which will be directly controlled via the player (all movement will be scripted and initiated by the action menu).

As the player progresses, the room the game takes place in can be upgraded, but it will be done as a whole and not with individual items. The player will be able to access other screens and functions by the action menu in order to hire/fire, view statistics, and the like.

I worked as a web application developer at top 50 web retailer for four years, but I have zero game dev experience (minus playing around with a MUD in college). I spend most of my time in Java and a small amount in JavaScript and PHP. I’m not afraid of scripting and am even looking forward to it, but I know it can be a time dump, and I would like to focus more on developing the game itself.

I’m unsure of what plugins will come in most handy. I’ve looked at Play Maker, Save State, 2D Toolkit, and the like in the hopes of saving some coding time. However, I don’t know how much of the functionality from these plugins I will actually use.

Does anyone here have experience with such a game, or experience that would correspond to one? Am I missing any key plugins? Would a plugin like Playmaker be overkill? Do you foresee any many major hurdles that immediately come to mind?

Thank you so much for any responses!

2

PlayMaker is totally awesome if you lack programming skills. It really does what it says but you have to learn to do this a bit different than normal. I can’t say much for 2D Toolkit or Save State because I have used them so little but they would help you with organization and also help implement functionality that would otherwise take up more of your time to do yourself. I also come from a web application development background but everything came easily to me once I learned the in’s and out’s of Unity and it’s scripting languages. My best advise for you is to just dive in to Unity and get dirty. Start taking baby steps and eventually you’ll end up with the knowledge to create whatever it is you’re trying to create.

3

I haven’t found anything (substantial) negative said about PlayMaker - I’ll probably take the plunge after I get my feet wet/soaked and am ready to seriously develop.

Baby steps are so hard, but I know I have to take the small steps and find minor victories. My dreams are bigger than my talents and knowledge can handle, and I discouragement can come too easily!

Thanks so much for your response!

4

Playmaker is a mixed bag, it’s really helpful to show you all the relatively common and most used classes and methods when you’re really new. When you have to start writing complex conditional statements(even not so complex) and loops it drives you bonkers with the number of clicks it takes to do a simple loop.

Just my experience with it anyways, it was worth the money just to get that 60 second overview of what classes and methods do certain things that you are likely going to run into, and then take that knowledge and write your own scripts.