I’ve been developing a few 2D games in the past both with Unity and other less powerful engines. Recently, I made a Candy Crush game using 2D Unity. It works okay, but I had to write a lot of logic of combos and moves etc.
Recently, I have a new spec that requires me to make some changes. So, the whole board isn’t full at once, marbles spawn in at set times, etc. This requires a HUGE rewrite on my part. Based on those rules, I figured it might be easier to just rewrite the game. I was thinking about maybe rewriting in 3D with the camera facing top looking down.
Thinking about the mechanics of Candy Crush or Bejeweled, for one it would look and feel nicer in 3D. But, would it be much harder than in 2D?
Based on my design specs, the pieces in my candy crush game will be only marbles, so essentially spheres. Is designing sphere artwork that looks decent fairly easy to do with ProBuilder?
I will still need a grid as the main floor panel. I’m guessing writing the logic would be similar to what I did with my 2d game (for loops for each tile to see if pieces match)… or is there a more clever way to do this in 3d?
What’s the benefit of going 3d if you already have a game working in 2d? Are you planning on doing something different with the extra axis, or are you a better artist working in 3d? Unless you’re doing something special the logic would be the same so I wouldn’t recommend changing from 2d to 3d. Going from 2d to 3d doesn’t automatically make something look/feel nicer
There’s actually no difference between 2D and 3D in Unity other than some project defaults and camera settings. You can make a 2D game with all 3D objects, make a 3D game with all 2D billboards, etc.
Just to add to this…in my case, I’m not much on 2d sprites…but with all the nice things we get for 3d art, I can generally make something “acceptable” so even though I’m doing 2d gameplay with my current project, everything is in 3d. That means that I can take advantage 3d effects as well. So my objects get nicely lit up by lights in 3d space, and the particle systems will be in 3d. Furthermore, if I so choose, I can come up with other eye candy type stuff that depends on the 3rd axis, or not.
My point…there can be a good reason to use 3d art, even in a 2d game. In my case, lack of artistic ability is the reason.