Unity Development — Adding Art
I will always stand by the philosophy that gameplay is the most important component when designing a game. That being said, it does take much more than that to create most memorable gaming experiences. You want to add in some style to make something comes together and be truly you. The first part of that will be to add the other artful components to go from prototype to artistic piece.
Right now the player we have is a cube, but we can turn it into whatever we want. To do that we are going to need some art. The Unity Asset Store and other online sources have plenty of free art assets for you to play with and get used to the process. Make a ‘Sprites’ or ‘Art’ folder in Assets to import everything.
I am using the Galaxy Shooter Assets from GameDevHQ, which provides an assortment of 2D sprites. This will cause some issues as right now all of our objects are 3D, but we can fix this fairly easily. For each 3D object you wish to turn into a 2D one, you are simply going to swap the Mesh Renderer for a Sprite Renderer, and swap the Rigidbody and Colliders for their 2D counterparts.
For my player I am going to use a spaceship, because it is cool and I like it. May I suggest that is also how you make your art decisions as well.
In the Sprite Renderer, the first attribute is ‘Sprite.’ That is where you will drag in your new image to act as the player or any other object you want to change. Make note, once you have your new image, you should go into your new collider and edit it to properly fit where you would like.
We can do some more now. How about we do the same thing for the enemies and lasers?
That looks much cooler that before. There is still one more thing I want to do before we move on though. In your art search, find some a proper background image. Once you have that, instead of attaching it to an object, you can simply drag it into the Hierarchy or Scene from the Project window. Then it will automatically be created. You may have to adjust the size to fill up the screen.
There is one problem you may notice pops up from here. In a 2D game, there is no Z axis, so how can you tell what is in front or behind one another? How can we make sure the background remains in the background? At the bottom of each Sprite Renderer, there is a Sorting Layer. You can change an object’s order in this sorting later.
You can also add layers and change them for specific objects. That way, no matter the order, something in the ‘Background’ layer will always be behind something in the ‘Foreground’ layer.
Let’s take a look at what we have now.
Now we feel like we are actually have a galactic battle in space. I stand by gameplay being most important, but it is not everything.