Unity 2D Development

For several years now, we've seen some fantastic 2D games created in Unity

We didn't always make life easy for those making 2D games

but they've kept coming all the same

and we've seen some amazing porducts appear on our asset store to help users making 2D games

We know everyone wants to make the game they want in Unity

and if that's a 2D title, we believe they should have the tools that they need out of the box

which includes our Free version

That's why we've been working on native 2D tools for Unity

We've added support for Sprites

2D default behaviour for the Scene view and Importer

a complete 2D physics engine

plus many optimisations and adjustments to existing Unity workflows

to make them more appropriate for 2D game development

And because these tools are built on top of the Unity you already know and love

you can mix 2D and 3D with ease

As a preview of these tools

we're releasing a demo project for beta users that shows off the new tools and workflows

Let's take a look at it now

This platform shooter is completely built with the new 2D tools

To start out with we've added Sprites as an importer type in Unity

and created automatic slicing

so whether you're bringing in an individual sprite

or a sheet of many, you'll have no problems

Once your sprites are created

you'll see them inside the project window as a Hierarchy
with the individual elements beneath it

From here you can simply drag and drop these sprites into the scene

to automatically create your clip and animator controller

and right away you have a working animated sprite to add to your game

Our characters are created from a number of sprites which are arranged in the Scene

and animated in the newly upgraded Animation window

We've added Dopesheet functionality to the Timeline

and a number of other tweaks to the UI to make it easier than ever to animate properties

Once animated, the character is then driven by the Animator

which stores all of our animation states

and lets us easily Trigger these animations with the new trigger parameter, from code

Our Scene view shows us a pure 2D view of the scene with this new toggle

and to ease sorting of 2D graphics, we've added Sorting Layers to Unity

These live with the existing Tags and Layers, and can be ordered here in the Inspector

We then apply them to the Renderer of an object, and hey presto its sorted

To make life even easier, we've added support for locking of these layers

so that when working on foreground elements

users won't accidentally drag background elements by mistake

In our game, everything is controlled by physics via a new Box2D implementation

We have 2D equivalents of Rigidbodies, Colliders, Joints and Physics Materials

all control of the characters and effects work with these

so we can have as much mayhem as we like

We'll be adding even more to the 2D tools in Unity

we have some cool stuff in store

we can't wait to see the awesome games you're going to creat with this new toolset