How to make a 2D Game in Unity - YouTube

So, a question we get asked a lot is how to make a 2D game?

Of course, this is a huge question to answer.

But, hopefully, this video should help point you in the right direction.

And this is actually filmed on our brand-new video camera.

So, I hope the quality is all right.

Apparently, this camera has a pretty narrow lens.

So, we had to do this crazy setup to make it work.

Luckily, making 2D games in Unity has gotten so much easier over the last couple of years

Ever since they introduced the new 2D features in version 4.3

We've seen a bunch of cool features and workflows for different aspects of working with 2D in Unity

Now, 2d games, of course, come in a variety of different art styles and genres.

And the tools that are right for you are going to completely depend on the game that you're making.

But, in general, we can split Unity up into two primary workflows.

Tile based.

And sprite based.

The tile based workflow is meant for games that are build on a grid

As the name suggests

You create environments by placing tiles.

Which makes it pretty fast and easy to create and modify levels.

The sprite based workflow, on the other hand, gives you more control

As it simply means that you place object freely in the world

As a result of this you can create more detailed and dynamic environments.

But it might not be as quick.

And, on top of that, Unity is also working on some tools for vector graphics

In case you are really fond of illustrator.

But, regardless of what workflow you choose

We first have to create a project.

So, to create a new project, we go "new"

And your UI might look a tiny bit different here

But that's because I'm using Unity hub

Which is still in beta

But the idea should be the same

We then select a name for our project

I'm just gonna call mine "2D Game Example".

We then select a Unity version.

I'm gonna be using 2018.2

Then we chose a save location

I'll just use my projects folder

And, finally, as our template, we want to make sure that we select 2D.

Let's then hit create project

And Unity is going to open up a new empty project.

And, now, we can see we have this empty scene

With only a main camera in it.

And because we made sure to select 2d as the template

Unity has set up some different settings on our camera

And in our editor

To work well with 2D.

Awesome!

Now, when starting with an empty project

I really recommend visiting the Unity Asset Store to find some assets to use for your game.

Of course, if you want you can always replace them with your own custom assets later.

Luckily, there are some really great free assets available that we can use.

I've gone ahead and compiled a list of some of my favorites.

If you want to check them out you can use the link in the description.

In here we have a pack for putting together cool pixel art caves

They say picks up platformer pack

As well as some more toony assets

All these are based around tiles

And so will fit perfectly with the tile based workflow.

If you want to use the sprite based workflow

There's also an incredibly detailed art pack

As well as a top-down dungeon pack that would work great for that

Some of these also include characters

But I've gone ahead and added a few separate ones just in case.

Now, once you've picked something that you like

We have to get it into Unity

The way that we do this, it's by opening up the asset store window.

So, we'll go window

We'll go under "General" and select the "Asset Store".

You can also press "Control 9".

We'll then navigate to the package that we want to download.

I'm just gonna get the free platform game assets.

It's right here.

So we'll click on that.

And once you find the asset, you can simply click this red button to first download

And then import it.

We'll then get this window

Where we can see all of the different assets that are included in the pack

And if there's something in particular that you don't want

Let's say, you already have a character

And don't need this one

We can simply uncheck it,

But I'd like to import everything. So I'm just gonna a select everything and hit import.

This one is called BayatGames

And under here we have the free platform game assets

And you can see a bunch of different subfolders with the different aspects of our pack

And most packs will also come with some kind of a demo scene.

In this case, there's a demo folder right here.

If we open that up and double click on the scene to open it.

We then go into the scene view

And we can see this nice example of how you can combine the different elements to create a level.

You can, of course, select the 2D Rect Tool at the top here.

The shortcut for this is the T key

And if you also make sure that you're in 2D mode at the top of our scene view.

We can then go in and simply click and change different elements around.

We can, of course, move them.

Rotate them.

And scale them, as well.

And so you can quickly start modifying these levels to make them your own.

But, of course, we want to create our own custom level.

So we'll go back to the default sample scene

And we can now start dragging in assets to use them.

And how you go about this is going to depend on the pack that you're using.

This pack here splits up all the sprites into individual images.

So, if we're going to say "Tiles" and then "PNG"

We have some different sizes available here.

I'm gonna go under 256.

I'm gonna select the "grass platform" and drag it in.

And that works right away.

We have all of our different assets and each one of them is a separate image.

So, we can simply drag in some different images to sketch out a level.

But what most 2D packs do is that they used a tile set

And a tile set is basically just a very large image

With a bunch of sprites laid side by side

For example, if we go to the asset store and download the sunny land

And open up the folder here

We can see that on the artwork

And then environment

In here, we can see that there is indeed a file called tile set

And if we have a look at this

We can see that it's basically just a bunch of smaller sprites in one larger image.

Now, if you want to learn how to create your own tile sets

And set them up in Unity.

We have a tutorial that I suggest you check out

But, luckily, this package has done all that for us.

If we just select the tile set sliced here

We can see that they've actually gone in and marked all the different tiles that make up this tile set

And if we expand this arrow here

We can actually see each individual tile in our tile set.

Pretty cool!

And just like any other image we can take any one of these.

And simply drag them in to the editor.

Now, this one is a lot smaller, but you can see it works just fine.

So, now that we know how to work with sprites.

Let's try and build out a quick level here.

So, we already have this grass platform here.

That's great. I'm just gonna place it here.

Let's also add a background.

So, I'm gonna go under new background.

Under PNG.

I'm just gonna select the lowest version here

Under background

And here we have another file.

Let's simply drag that in, as well.

And we can see this looks nice in our camera.

But we can also see that it's overlaid on top of a grass.

And, of course, we want our background to be behind it.

For this we use something called sorting layers

So, to the right in our inspector here

Under the Sprite Renderer

We can see the setting called the sorting layer

If we click this, we can add a new sorting layer.

This takes us to another menu

Where we can hit the plus sign to create a new layer

Let's call this one "background"

And if we want this to be behind the default layer

We actually need to put it on top

That's because this actually represents the drawing order

In other ways, we first draw our background

And then we draw the default layer on top

Let's just go in and add another one here called the "foreground"

In case you want to have some foreground elements as well.

So, now we can go into a new background

And we can change the sorting layer here to background.

And "voilà"!

A grass platform appears.

We can also maybe add a coin to our game

To do that we'll go under the coin animation.

Let's go into PNG again

And let's just select the small version here

And as you can see this has a bunch of different images

And if we go through these quickly

We can see that they make up an animation.

So, to add these as a single animated object.

We simply select the first one

Hold down shift

And select the last one

And we then drag all of them in

Unity is going to notice that we are dragging in a bunch of images

And so it's gonna ask us to create a new animation with these images.

I'm gonna make a new folder for this

I'm gonna store all of our animation in here.

Let's open it up.

And let's call this the "coin animation".

Let's hit save

And inside of our animation folder

Unity is now going to create both a animation file

As well as an animator controller

And this is currently named after one of our images.

I'm just gonna rename this to "coin animator".

And now if we select our coin

We can see that it has an animator component as well

If we go to the animation window

Which you can always find on the window

Animation

We can actually go through each individual image in this animation

If we hit play

We can play through it

Or if we simply hit this button to play the game

We can see that the animation plays and repeats by default.

So, now we have an animated coin in our game

We can, of course, move this around

Put it anywhere that we would like

And just like when creating any game in unity

We can then add components to our different game objects in order to make them do different things

Say, for example, that we wanted this coin to have physics applied

Well, then we could go ahead and add a new component.

We can go under physics 2D

And here, we have a bunch of different components for adjusting 2D physics on our game object.

I'm just gonna select the Box Collider 2D

If we then go into the Scene view and select our coin and hit F to focus on it

We should be able to seeing that there's actually a green line surrounding our coin.

It might not be too visible from the screen recording, but it is there.

I'm just gonna give it a size of 1 on the X

This way we can kind of see it more clearly

And the Y is just fine as it is.

But adding a Collider is not enough.

If we want this to fall onto our platform

We also have to apply physics to it

To do this, we'll go add component

And we'll search for rigidbody 2D

This will apply it physics to our coin

And if we now hit play

We should see that immediately our coin falls.

However, because we don't have a collider on our grass,

It's just gonna fall right through on platform

So, that's here go and add a box Collider 2D.

And we can go in and edit the collider here

And I'm just gonna drag the top a bit down

So, that it looks like our coin is landing at the center of our platform

I'm also going to take the platform and drag it down a bit

And if we now hit play once more

We can see that the coin falls and lands on a platform

We also see that we have this weird issue

Where sometimes our coin is behind a platform

And sometimes it's in front

And that's because they're currently on the same sorting layer

And not only that they have the same order within that layer

To change that we can go to our coin here

And we can increase the order in layer

So, if we set this to any value greater than 1

It will be drawn on top of our platform

I'm just gonna set it to something like 10

And now when we hit play

Our coin always appears on top of our platform.

So, that is kind of the very basics of working with 2D objects in Unity,

And currently we're just using the default sprite workflow

We can take any of these objects and drag it around freely.

In other words, we aren't restricted to a grid.

However, because this platform actually has a bunch of different tasks in it.

It would work great with the tile based workflow.

So, let me just give you a quick preview of how that would work.

If you want to learn more about using Tile Maps in Unity,

We have a tutorial dedicated to that. So definitely check that out.

So, for now I'm just gonna take these two objects and remove them

And instead I'm gonna right-click in our scene and I'm gonna go to the object

And create a new tile map

This creates an object in our scene called grid

And as you can see this does overlay a grid on top of our scene.

I'm gonna set the cell size of this grid to 2 by 2

This way it's a bit larger

And under this grid, we have the tile map.

We can also go and open up the tile set window

So we'll go window

2D

And select the Tile Palette

Let's dock this to the side of our Scene view

And the tile palette is basically just the window where we add all of our tiles

And then we can select between them in order to paint them into our scene.

So, I'm gonna create a new palette here

Let's just name it something like "Grass Platform palette".

I'm gonna hit create

And I'm just gonna store it in the base folder here

So, it's select folder

And now we can simply drag sprites in here in order to add them to our palette

Of course, we have a bunch of tiles right here

So, I'm just gonna select all of them and drag them right in.

And it's going to ask us where we want to generate all the tile assets

I'm gonna right click and create a new folder for this.

Let's call it tiles

And it's it that folder

It's then gonna generate all of our tiles

And voilà!

We can now see all of our tiles inside of this window

And we can select any one of them by simply clicking on it

And by selecting the brush tool at the top here

We can then start painting them into a scene.

We can also see that they don't quite line up with our grid

To change that, we need to select all of our sprites.

And to the right here, we'll change the pixels per unit

And each of these sprites is 256 by 256

And we want each one of them to be two units wide

Because we set our grid to 2 by 2

And so we simply need to take this value and half it

And that makes 128.

So, we'll set the pixels per unit to 128.

And if we then apply that

We can see that they snap right into place

So I'm just going to use the paint brush and erase the two two a quick level here

Awesome!

Again, I really suggest you check out our tutorial on tile maps

If this is the workflow that you want to use.

So, hopefully, that should give you an idea of what tools you have at your disposal

When starting to make 2D games in Unity.

Of course, this is only the beginning

And we'll be releasing new videos on the different aspects of making 2D games going forward

Starting with player movement

If there are any particular subjects that you would like to see

Like enemies, one-way platforms or shooting

Definitely let us know in the comments

Until then I recommend just playing around with Unity

And having some fun sketching out your own levels

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