(Aug 26, 2011 08:26 AM)funkboy Wrote:  I think a brief tutorial on how to make Unity work well for a 2D game would be a seriously interesting article.

I'd love to do that (or see that done). I'll definitely include what I've learned about making 2D games using Unity in my postmortem.

There are several extensions (purchasable on Unity's Asset Store) which help out quite a bit in this department. The most notable are Sprite Manager 2 and 2D Toolkit (I use 2D Toolkit). Both of these will automatically generate sprite atlases for you, handle sprite animation, and efficiently batch your sprites when rendering. They both also support pixel-perfect sprite drawing from either a perspective or orthographic camera. 2D Toolkit also supports bitmap fonts in several popular formats.

Beyond authoring and drawing the sprites on the screen, you can make a 2D game with Unity in much the same way you'd make any other Unity game. As I mentioned in an earlier post, doing tile-based sprite games would require some extensions to the Unity editor to make map authoring practical, but this is still probably easier than writing an editor from scratch. You could also write a custom asset importer that handles files from Tiled or something similar.