Unity 2D Game 5: Glitch Garden


The fifth video game I made in Unity was another clone of a game I spent a lot of time playing, this time as an adult – Plants vs Zombies.

For comparison, here’s Plants vs Zombies:

Plants vs Zombies

and here’s my finished Glitch Garden:

Glitch Garden

We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest thing I learned was how to do Sprite Sheet animation. Having done bone-based animation in Blender years ago, I have to say that in comparison, sprite sheet animation is easy-peasy. The tradeoff is less flexibility – you only have what your artist drew (or you bought or got for free online), but it essentially automates everything about animation.

If you want to play my version of Glitch Garden you have a few options. You can play it on the web. Or you can go to the github releases page and grab the binary for Linux or Windows.

There’s still some tuning I need to do an a couple glitches (pun intended) to work out, but it’s probably the most polished of the games I’ve worked on as part of this GameDev.tv Unity 2D series. There’s just one game left – one they call Tilevania that is ported over from an earlier version of their Unity class (one that I think combined 3D and 2D into one class). I think, of all the games they’ve used as the basis of their lessons, this is the first one that I don’t have too much experience with. When I saw their intro video, it looked like some of the games I came across in my DOS Shareware days, but unlike everything else, it isn’t a game I have lots of fondness for. Nevertheless, it looks like I’ll learn a final great batch of lessons related to 2D game development in Unity.

After that I’m probably going to take a short break from game development to work on a couple of programming projects before taking a swing at their Unity 3D courses.

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