Hi,
Just a brief intro, I've been making non commercial games for years, (though non consecutively), and have a few finished projects, so while I'm not totally new to the game creation process, I am new to Unity and can only use scripting languages, if that (C#? Not in this lifetime. I'm really more of an artist who's been forced to wear multiple hats). Having said that, I'm hoping Playmaker will allow me to start moving towards Unity development.
I've taken a few tutorials to get me familiar with the tools (both Playmaker and 2D Toolkit), but the funny (and maybe sad) thing is, I can't find one tutorial for any top down 2D games that
aren't scrolling shooters, least of all one that has jumping. And I know this is possible because, well, to get to the point...
I'm looking to prototype a game similar to these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uvM-vKVgGQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGtgO-jX76AAs of now, all I can do in Unity via Playmaker is have you jump vertically on the Y axis on a horizontal scrolling game, where rigidbodied assets have collision at the very top of the object, and you could fall off the map. But with a game that scrolls vertically downward, I can't exactly have the character fall down the Y axis. I can translate the player object down the Y axis if I disable gravity, but it doesn't look like it's jumping. Plus, it needs to stop dead center in the middle of rocks, which are also sprites. If I have the rigidbody enabled, the player character just sits on top of the sprite as opposed to landing in the middle.
I'm looking to do this in the most effective/efficient way, so while I'm sure I could cheat in the animations by just having the character's jumping sprites increase upward on the Y axis, I can't see that being effective for longer jumps, and the farthest distance is jumping over 2 rocks and landing on the 3rd. Additionally, if you time your jump incorrectly and jump where there is no rock, you fall in the water, so there still has to be something there to detect a miss (and not just fall into a void). I'm thinking maybe an invisible object would go there, but I could be wrong.
As a final note, I also want to mention that this game will be endless until you miss or the big bad guy behind you catches up to you, so would it be better to have the character actually move downwards on the Y axis on a seemingly long playfield, or should the character not actually move down the Y axis at all, and everything else scrolls upward (of course with objects being destroyed at a specific coordinate)? If the latter is the case, the enemy will have to be scrolled upward too while still approaching, if that makes sense.