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I'm working on an XNA isometric game and I've already done lot of work. Since XNA is going to be discontinued, I'm not sure if I should change engines or not. So I'm looking into alternatives.

I'm already working on Unity for another game, a 3d game.

Question 1: Is it possible work with 2D tiles generation in Unity?

Question 2: Will building a 3D world based on Unity using tiles/blocks reduce the game performance?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ See the FAQ about what types of questions to ask here. This one, I believe, is off topic. It doesn't have a correct answer and you seem to be looking for a discussion. \$\endgroup\$
    – House
    Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 16:29
  • \$\begingroup\$ not sure what you mean... i just want to know hows unity performance over a 2d game, because all games i see are 3d... its a question with an answer, just because you don't have experience to answer it doesn't make it an invalid question \$\endgroup\$
    – Navy Seal
    Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 16:44
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    \$\begingroup\$ Heh. No it's not that I don't have experience with it. There's no correct answer. Someone can't answer "How easy it is" or "How good it would look" or even what the performance would be. It would depend entirely on what skills you have, what your project is, your art skills, what performance aspects you're targeting, how you built the game and many other factors. It's not answerable in its current form. \$\endgroup\$
    – House
    Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 16:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ if you tried to implement a 2d game on unity having a minimum idea of c# / javascript you would know what difficulties you had to develop a "2d engine"... Its just like going to android by knowing java... and i can tell the troubles i had with the resources folders and the structure of the framework itself... or when you know java and start working for mobile with j2me you have trouble implementing some functions because you are not used to all those jsr packs and permissions to write in the folders... so like i said... experience... \$\endgroup\$
    – Navy Seal
    Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 17:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ Those difficulties would be totally different from person to person. You're looking to discuss with someone what kind of difficulties you can expect. That's a reasonable question and the resulting discussion could be very useful to you. It's not the type of questions we deal with on this site though. Look at the FAQ, check out the other sites that deal more with discussion oriented questions like this. Good luck. \$\endgroup\$
    – House
    Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 17:26

3 Answers 3

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Unity doesn't have any real built-in support for 2D work. Compared to most 2D game development libraries and frameworks - eg. Pygame, XNA, Cocos2D, SDL, SFML - you will find it harder to write effective 2D games, especially tile-based ones. It is not as simple as "3D, ignoring one dimension" because of issues like texture management, texture bleeding, setting an orthographic camera correctly, avoiding seams in the rendering, and so on.

However, there are some add-on libraries you can get which help you with some of these issues. If you search the Unity Asset Store you will find some (paid and free) which you might consider using.

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  1. Yes, Unity supports 2D tiles. There are some tools (and free methods) for this and you can see it clearly by some of the 2D games made with Unity. And plenty of questions about it already on the Unity site.

  2. This depends entirely on how it's implemented and the features you want to support. There are plenty of 2D games that are written using a 3D engine, they simply ignore the 3rd dimension. There may be low level optimizations you're missing out on by using a 3D engine, but you can easily achieve playable performance with a 3D engine.

All in all, this is something you'll need to research and find out the specifics of what you want to implement and what features you need to support with the technology at hand.

Additionally, just because XNA is being discontinued, does not mean it's going to disappear. There's still plenty of life left and unless you're waiting on a feature that XNA doesn't currently have, you'll be able to complete your game using XNA.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Bastion wasn't made with Unity. It was made with XNA and later MonoGame. monogame.net/showcase/bastion \$\endgroup\$
    – General Waters
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 22:38
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Neeko Thanks. I only vaguely remembered it was something that was cross platform. I think the point is still valid, there are 2D games created using Unity. \$\endgroup\$
    – House
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 23:06
  • \$\begingroup\$ No worries, just wanted to clarify. Good answer regardless! Yep, Unity is a valid engine for 2D games, especially with add-ons like 2D Toolkit available on the asset store. \$\endgroup\$
    – General Waters
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 23:49
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To answer your question, yes Unity can produce a 2d game. Its not entirely designed for a 2d game but since 2d is just a special case of 3d then... well you see where this is going. There are likely a number of toolkits that you can employ to make your 2d experience in unity a little easier.

That said, have you ever heard of MonoGame? It is an open source replacement for XNA which ... suprise suprise is crossplatform. So, if you dont want to have to learn an entire new paradigm of coding style ala Unity and you are quite comfortable with XNA then I would suggest you take a look at MonoGame.

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