Retro Runner – Resurrection

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.

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Another New Project?!

As a bit of an offshoot from my Unreal Engine project, I got the idea for a simple 2D sidescroll/platform game where the player is always running forward and it is up to them to time their ducks and jumps to make it through the level. After getting this idea, I knew that I had to make it (despite it not being completely original). So I decided to begin creating this using GameMaker 8.0 Pro and 3 days later, I have a working concept and a playable game I’m calling: Retro Runner!

retro-mario-b2Brainstorming the back story and other ideas behind this, I decided to keep it simple, retro and a bit nostalgic. For this reason, there is no real back story. You’re just a character running through classic 8-bit and 16-bit environments. As of now, I only have games of the 8-bit era: Super Mario Bros, Castlevania and Contra. I’m still thinking about what other games would make for simple, yet challenging environments (so if you have any, please let me know).

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