Original GameMaker8 screenshot of Retro Runner.
As my familiarity of Unity continued to grow and with steady progress being made on my 3D platforming game: Besus: Journey for Vitality, one night the thought to resurrect my Retro Runner project in Unity popped in to my head. My only hesitation came from how I would go about porting a project I started in GameMaker 8 to Unity 3D. After exploring the 2D functionality offered in Unity, I knew it could be done with relative ease and decided to pursue this new endeavor.
In order to get started with 2D in Unity, I downloaded the “official” 2d platformer tutorial/asset from the asset store to familiarize myself with 2D rigidbodies and Vector2’s. After taking a look at how everything worked, I stripped away what I didn’t need and ended up just using the Rigidbody2D forces being applied for movement and jumping. Even then, I only needed to apply a constant force to the player as horizontal force would always be applied (with the exception of slowing down while sliding). With the movement established I created a simple camera script which set the camera transform to the equivalent of the player transform (with an adjustable x-axis offset). Now that the core mechanics were in place, I moved on to getting the graphics portion of the game ported over.