Another threadhere prompted me to think about the most popular 2D desktop (Steam) games that were made in Unity. I’m not talking about mobile games.
I never really gave it some focused thought before but ya know… I don’t think any of the most excellent 2D games were created in Unity… ?
Gamemaker has been the engine powering many of the awesome 2D games released in recent years. And for the ones that are not made in Gamemaker… well they seem to be made at a lower level using things like C# & XNA (Stardew Valley) and Monkey X (Crypt of the NecroDancer).
I find this very interesting that FTL, Hotline Miami and every other major 2D game I can think of was not made in Unity.
Surely there has to be at least a few.
Does anyone know of any popular 2D games on Steam that were created with Unity?
Awesome thanks! BroForce and Rimworld look like the kind of games I am thinking of.
Pillars of Eternity and Shadowrun look interesting as well but I was mainly thinking of games using the more traditional 2D art instead of pre-rendered 3D.
I’m playing Year Walk ATM and I think that’s pretty great.
Cuphead, looks to be an absolute blast and a must purchase as soon as that comes out if it supports mac and not just xbox. It also wouldn’t surprise me if games like ‘Limbo’ started off inside unity but eventually opted for their own custom engine to ease gameplay prototyping.
Awesome point and click games, like Fran Bow, could well have been made inside unity but weren’t.
I also consider ‘Inside’ to be practically a 2D except with a 3D look at feel.It’s controls are more or less 2D inspired and constrained which is why it works so well, that was made in unity and is easily the best platform puzzler to date.
It might be that until recent years Unity was not so 2D focussed, and its still building out its toolset, so maybe it isn’t though of quite so much as the go-to platform for 2D work yet… at least not in a mass-appeal way… but its getting there. Also a lot of folks are distracted with mobile when it comes to 2D. I’m moving back to desktop/appletv myself to take better advanced of a nice bigger screen, better controls, more performance, etc.
@KnightsHouseGames and @iamthwee Yeah that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. A killer 2D game… metroidvania, platform puzzler, beat em’ up, roguelike, heck even a shmup. Just something that when you think of Unity and 2D one game (or maybe 3 or 4 awesome games) immediately comes to your mind.
@imaginaryhuman_1 I think you may well be right about that. I’ve seen some very cool looking 2D games in progress around here and they are always being made for mobile. Never understood why folks are so focused on mobile. Sucks as a game machine for action games IMO.
Ha ha! Well not a hole in the market. There are plenty of excellent 2D games on Steam. Most just aren’t made with Unity for whatever reason.
There almost seems to be this view “out there” that using Unity for a 2D game is “just wrong”. Because people see it as using a sledgehammer to drive a tack in the wall I guess. I’ve even had that comment on a forum regarding one of my recent 2D game releases “I question the use of Unity [for this]” and expected it to be like straight HTML5 programming.
Anyway, I am slowly ramping up. Have two solid 2D games out on GameJolt now made in Unity. Currently teamed up with another dev making a third. By next year I should be ramped up enough to flood Steam with many good 2D made in Unity games if all goes according to plan.
Probably because until recently, Unity’s 2D capability came with a pretty hefty pricetag attached to it, if you didn’t want to/have the ability to code your own features. Meanwhile GameMaker has a huge resource of tutorials for a wide swath of subjects and has a huge 2D feature set, compared to Unity’s relatively meagre offering.
That’s the spirit, I think unity has a bad name on steam, people naturally think oh no unity game, so the more quality 2D games the better.
I also forgot ‘pinstripe’ as a good contender, and of course ‘oxenfree’ which was on my to buy list. But I wasn’t to sure on an entirely narrative driven game, that may change.
I actually checked out Gamemaker about a month ago. It’s so different than how I am used to developing I decided against it. I had just spent a few months earlier in the year getting a streamlined programming-oriented workflow down for Unity. It looked like doing the same with GMS would take as long or even longer.
I bought the Pro version for my step son though and he loves it. Has made 2 games already in the past month. Of course, first year in college and has a pretty relaxed class schedule which means a lot of free time. I’ve been encouraging him to get out of the GUI stuff and more into custom scripting. I’m glad he finally got into game dev. Too bad we aren’t using the same dev tool though.
Anyway I think you’re right. Gamemaker still seems to be the first thing that comes to people’s minds for 2D games.
