Been working on Throneward’s 2.5D battle scene. Here’s the walk up to a black dragon and the transition into the fight. Pretty happy seeing it all together now.

Encounter staged for this clip; loading shortened and battle HUD hidden.

This update brings a massive architectural change: objects and NPCs are no longer strictly grid-locked, allowing you to place, drag, and position items at exact X/Y pixel coordinates! Moving away from rigid grid arrays has also made Undo and Redo significantly faster, especially on large maps.

I’ve also added a tile-snap toggle, improved click-and-drag handling anywhere on an object, refined depth sorting, fixed playtest collisions, and updated all export pipelines (JSON, TMX, CSV, LVL) to support free-form coordinates. Note that this X/Y coordinate update is part of the Pro Workflow Edition.

Official site Itch.io: https://crytek22.itch.io/tilemakerdot

GitHub: https://github.com/andrei-voia/TileMakerDOT

YouTube tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fiajGU32Jg

For anyone unfamiliar with the project, TileMaker DOT is a Free (with a very complete, professional paid cheap version too), open source 2D map editor I'm building. It uses a data first, ID based workflow and handles visual depth sorting automatically so you don't have to manage multiple layers for object heights.

Give it a try and let me know if you have any feedback! If the editor helps with your projects and you want to support development, a rating or a small donation on Itch is always appreciated.

Thank you all for your support!

I made these in Gimp to use to test out my camera system, but figured that people may get some good use out of them. I've put them on the asset store for free. Every sprite was made by hand by me. In addition to ground tiles there are paths, water, trees, rocks, and a few other fun little things like the snowman.

There's a quick video on the store page that shows one way that you could potentially put them together. The pack also includes a few little neat things like a script to animate the water tiles, to create waves at the shorelines, to blend together tiles at the edges of biomes, etc.

If you use these tiles to make something, I'd love to see it!

Here's the link to the asset store listing if anyone is interested: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/environments/timbeaux-s-2d-worldbuilding-toolkit-412078

hello. i want to make in unity shader graph a border that has colors that move around it, splitting at point Y (start point) and merging at point X. Like two cars that start simultaneously in two different paths, on a circuit, and they meet at the end. I already have the border (2d UI image) and a mask with the colors. i just cant nail it and obtain the final result that i want.

I'm trying to add a shader to my sprite. The sprite is clean in both libresprite and ingame, but when i set it as the default texture in the shader graph main texture, dots show up, and it is the same for 90% of my sprites. Using this material for my sprite means the dots show up there too. I have no idea where these came from. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit : (Comment from unity forums) :

The extra dots are not a bug in your shader or in Unity.

They come from the source texture itself.

Where the dots actually come from

When you export a sprite with transparency from LibreSprite (or Aseprite, Photoshop, etc.), the fully transparent pixels still contain RGB color data. Most image editors do not zero out the RGB channels of transparent pixels. They just set the alpha to 0 and leave whatever color was there before (or random leftover values from anti-aliasing, previous layers, compression, etc.).

Unity’s normal Sprite Renderer and the built-in sprite shaders always multiply by alpha, so those leftover colors become invisible.

Shader Graph’s Sample Texture 2D preview (and any material that doesn’t properly use the alpha) simply shows the raw RGB values. That’s why you suddenly see the dots only when you look at the texture inside Shader Graph.

This is extremely common with pixel-art sprites. Roughly 90% of transparent PNGs have some amount of this “garbage” RGB data in the transparent areas.

Why connecting Alpha fixes it

Once you plug the A output into the Fragment’s Alpha, the shader starts discarding/masking those pixels the same way the normal sprite material does. The dots disappear because their alpha is 0.

You don’t need any special workaround nodes (multiply RGB by alpha, Branch, etc.) unless you specifically want a cleaner preview inside the graph. The normal connection is the correct and intended way.

Before/after of the water in Exil Island, my top-down multiplayer survival game (Unity 6, URP 2D).

The old ocean was all tiles: depth tiles tinted by distance from the shore, a tint layer on top, and foam animated tile by tile along the beach edge. It looked flat, and the foam tiles drifted out of sync, so you could see the seams.

What changed:

• The water tiles are still there for gameplay, but they’re no longer drawn.
• When the map is generated, I bake a small texture that stores each cell’s distance to the shore.
• One shader on a quad under the map reads it and draws everything: a dithered depth ramp, surf lines rolling in, foam at the waterline, and a few drifting crests and glints.
• It works per world pixel and updates at a low frame rate, so it stays on the pixel grid and feels hand-animated rather than smooth.
• The foam timing comes from that distance, not from each tile, so the whole coastline moves together.
• The sand got a wet band painted into the beach edge tiles.
• It’s lit by the 2D lights, so day and night still work.

Happy to answer questions. What would you add next: splashes, reflections, or leave it alone?

If you want to see it move, there’s a free browser alpha on itch.

I'm making a roguelite deckbuilder where you fight using prime factorization.

I participated in this Steam Next Fest, and so far, 29% of demo players have played for at least an hour. I don't know the current benchmarks, but that makes me hopeful that at least some people have really enjoyed it.

At the same time, I've received a lot of criticism of the visuals. I want to improve them, but I have very little design experience and honestly don't know where to start.

Looking at these screenshots, what would you change first? Colors, fonts, layout, art style—I'd really appreciate some honest advice.

Steam page (free demo): https://store.steampowered.com/app/4932970/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch_2026oct&utm_content=indiedev

I’ve been experimenting with a new Surface feature for my Asset Store product Mesh Shapes, and I’m looking for developers who are interested in trying it out and giving some feedback.

The goal with this change is to make it much easier for AI to generate simple graphics and shape-based artwork in perspective directly inside Unity.

The basic idea is that everything is still created from normal editable 2D shapes i.e. polygons, lines and beziers etc. but groups of shapes can sit on different surfaces such as the ground, front, side or roof just to keep some preset options everyone can relate to, but any values can be used for the surface orientation.

Those surfaces can then be viewed with perspective or otho, so you can change the POV, rotate surfaces, add depth to shapes and change how their front, top and side faces appear without turning the artwork into traditional 3D models. The only limitation is as its 2D art its using sorting values rather than depth sorting but we are working on a solution for that.

I’ve been getting reasonably good results with very little artistic direction. Basically I am asking AI to create small diorama-style scenes directly in Unity. That’s really just where I started experimenting with it though, it could potentially be used for much more than that for creation of art scenes in games with full editability in the engine scene.

The useful part is that the AI isn’t generating a flattened image. It’s building the scene from individual 2D Mesh Shapes and Surfaces, so everything remains editable afterwards. You can move objects around, change colours, modify individual shapes, adjust the perspective or change the POV without having to regenerate the artwork.

For me the main idea is to give AI a way to assist developers to develop games as a simple way to create graphics that have some spatial structure and perspective, while still keeping the workflow very lightweight and editable like 2D art which is easier for most people to create custom art for than 3D. Also by editting directly in Unity the process for testing is much faster.

Also the art is all mesh vector, you can texture shapes with sprites too among many other features within Mesh Shapes as standard.

It’s still experimental, so I’m mainly looking for people who would actually try using it and tell me what works, what doesn’t, and what would make the workflow more useful.

If this sounds interesting and you’d like to try it, please get in touch with me via a direct or private message here and I will arrange it for you.

I’d be really interested to see what other developers do with it and get some real-world feedback. Hopefully this idea makes sense and is interesting to other developers!!

One infection, four very different places for your party to have a bad day.

We made Fantasy Backgrounds #4 - Mutated Lands in response to a request from one of our users. It includes four hand-painted 2D battle backgrounds:

• Blighted Barrens: cracked ground, twisted trees and a stormy sky.
• Spore Caverns: dark caves with a blue-green glow across the floor.
• Tainted Jungle: a pale clearing framed by broad leaves, hanging moss and trees fading into blue haze.
• Frostbloom Forest: frozen woodland with pale blooms pushing through the snow.

Each scene leaves an open area for characters to stand and fight, with separate foreground, midground and distant layers for parallax scrolling. All four backgrounds are horizontally tileable.

The pack also includes:

• Individual PNG elements with transparency.
• Full layered PSD source files for every scene, for recolouring and rearranging the artwork.
• Three themed Shader Graph shaders.

The images can be used in any render pipeline; the three shaders require URP and Shader Graph.

You could use the locations as separate encounters, or connect them through a story about the same infection spreading from one place to the next. No safe biome, apparently.

Unity Asset Store:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/401802

Also included in Fantasy Backgrounds Mega Pack.

I'm Mohamed from Virtual Verse Studio. We made Dead Mile in Unity, and this is a short breakdown of how its 2D lane-defense combat works.

Before the run: choose six fighters. That sets the options you can bring into the fight.

During the run: spend Courage to deploy them along the road and protect the house. Squad selection and deployment are separate decisions: choosing a fighter doesn't put them on the field immediately.

Once abilities charge: their cards glow, and you tap to activate them. Being ready and being the right moment are two different things; you decide whether to use an ability now or hold it for the incoming pack.

If you want to try that loop, the campaign works offline on Android and iOS. Dead Mile is free with ads and optional in-app purchases.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.virtualverse.deadmile

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6803154518

Asset/code disclosure: character sprites are licensed packs. Backgrounds, house, UI portraits, music and voices use AI-generated assets; Unity AI assisted the code. This post was prepared with AI assistance.

Hey everyone!

A new update for Rigby2D, the free, open-source 2D skeletal animation editor I've been working on.

The biggest addition is that Rigby2D now runs directly in your browser. No installation needed, just open it and start animating.

What's new in v0.2.6:

• Detachable Timeline, Tree, and Inspector panels
• Save and switch between custom window layouts
• Onion skinning with configurable previous and next frames
• Pixel-art support with nearest-neighbor filtering
• Timeline editing and undo fixes

There's plenty more already built in, including AutoRig, IK, mesh deformation, animation retargeting, Python scripting, Game and Film workspaces, and runtimes for JavaScript, Rust, and Godot 4.

It's also great to see people starting to contribute to the project. The recent updates include community-built features and fixes, and I'm happy to welcome more contributors.

Try it online: https://jaisurya-dev-art.github.io/rigby2d/editor/

75-second overview: https://youtu.be/KK3WT9YzhAE

GitHub: https://github.com/jaisurya-dev-art/rigby2d

It's still early alpha, so there's more to improve. If you give it a try, let me know what works, what doesn't, or what you'd like to see added.

Thanks for the support so far!

So I have finished my first floor, and I am about to make my 2nd scene for the 2nd floor. Is there an easy way to copy and paste everything just like I did on the first floor over to the 2nd without recreating everything over. My 2nd floor will look exactly the same. I will just add an 2nd staircase on the 2nd floor and remove a door at the bottom. Please tell me there is an easy way to do all this.

Unity 6, 2D, Cinemachine 3. I needed a galaxy that wraps: fly off the right edge, come back on the left, with no visible seam. The usual answer is to clone every GameObject near the edge, but with hundreds of ships, projectiles and planets that is a lot of ghosts to keep in sync, so I did it with Cameras instead:

• Extra Cameras, only at the seam. When the main Camera's view hangs past a map edge, I enable 1-3 extra Cameras offset by exactly one map width and/or height. Each one gets a Camera.rect covering only its slice of the screen, so the slices tile into one image. Nothing in the scene is duplicated.
• Never subtract two positions. Every distance and direction goes through a MapWrap.ShortestDelta helper that takes the short way round, and aiming/steering use the nearest "image" of the target.
• Physics2D doesn't know about wrapping, so a wrapper around Physics2D.OverlapCircleNonAlloc repeats the query at the offset images when the circle reaches over the seam.
• Objects wrap their own transform in LateUpdate and raise an event; the camera rig calls CinemachineCore.OnTargetObjectWarped(target, delta) so the Cinemachine camera jumps with the ship instead of swooshing across the whole map.
• The one place I do duplicate: a ship straddling the seam mirrors its SpriteRenderers for the few frames it takes to cross, or it is visibly cut in half along the camera split.
• Parallax background layers are tiled at a size that divides the map exactly, so the stars line up across the seam too, and each seam Camera shifts them by its own offset.

Happy to go deeper on any part (the viewport maths, Screen Space - Camera canvases, physics at the seam). The project is Cosmic Dominion; free demo on Steam on October 29.

The town of Torovo resets after three days. Every character has their own schedule in these 72 hours. Use the loop to your advantage to learn their routines and build your case.

Used some Unity magic to make it playable in-browser.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4952830/Torovo/

Sharing the final boss from my 2D ragdoll stickman game.

A few things I learned building him: - The ragdoll is driven by target positions per limb, so attacks are just poses the physics tries to reach. That's why every swing looks a bit different. - The flying kick sets the velocity on every body part each physics step. Applying force only to the hip didn't work: the other limbs dragged him down and he landed short. - The shockwave raycasts the ground every frame, so it follows slopes and dies at walls or gaps. - To make him feel heavy: angular damping on everything except the arms, plus a torque that keeps the head and torso upright.

Happy to answer questions about the setup. The game is free on Android (link in comments).

🎉 Our bug report became a Unity engine fix. While putting GPU materials on world-space panels we traced a WebGL crash (GfxDevice::CopyBufferRanges: range reads out of bounds) to one line in Unity's UI geometry updater, reported it with the root cause and a suggested fix, and shipped a build-machine patch in the meantime. Unity's UI Toolkit team took it as UUM-151098 and fixed it in Unity 6000.6.2f1 and 6000.7.0b1, the way the report proposed. On those editors world-space materials just work in WebGL, no patch and no flag; on 6000.5 (Won't Fix upstream) Tools/UirStagingPatch still has you covered. Thank you, Unity.

Hey there, i am developing a mixture of HoMM and Battlebrothers with army building and a deep progression system. Naturally i had to build countless of interconnected UIs with overlapping canvases etc.. This is probably the main UI where you manage your army. Bit gruesome but well - hope there is a small niche who likes the gruesomeness ;-). There is a free demo if you want to check it out - would love to get some feedback how everything feels => https://store.steampowered.com/app/5282860?utm_source=reddit

Trying to make space-efficient, intuitive UI when there's two wizards with giant conkers taking up most of the screen has been a challenge! I'd love to know which of these two layouts people prefer at first glace (ie: does one feel more cluttered / arranged more intuitively). There's a key on the final slide to clarify a few elements that might not be immediately obvious.

I'm down to these two layouts at the moment; I'm aware they're quite similar, but I just can't decide on these final placements. I'd love your help! The first screenshot is the current layout, and if you'd like to play with it for yourself there's a Demo on Steam! (It's a physics-based conker/deck builder).

I am very new to this. Here is my code in the picture. I have a door. When the Player walks through the door. The trigger needs to happen. However it's not triggering. On the player I have the Rigid body 2D selected. However the door is still not triggering. I've been trying for 2 hours. I don't know where the problem is. Please help.