The Ultimate Guide to making a 2D strategy game in Unity

Kick off the game creation adventure by building battlefields and Unity. Program tile system to detect obstacles and accessibility, then draw, rig, and animate the first dark soldier's movement.

Design and assemble a 2D battlefield in Unity by creating tile art in Photoshop, slicing sprites, configuring prefab tiles, and randomizing tile graphics and obstacles for a varied, playable map.

Set up interactive tiles in Unity with colliders and hover effects that scale on mouse enter and use a layer mask with an overlap circle to check for obstacles.

Draw, color, and animate your first character—the evil soldier unit—for a top-down 2D Unity strategy game, exporting separated body parts for animation and battlefield deployment.

build and rig a 2d character in unity by slicing sprites, adjusting pivot points, and parenting parts to a root, then craft an idle animation with keyframes.

Learn to implement a turn-based movement system in Unity by selecting units, computing walkable tiles on a grid using speed, and highlighting reachable tiles for a 2D strategy game.

Finish the movement system by enabling click-to-move to walkable tiles, validating the selected unit, and moving along the x axis first, then the y axis, using move-towards with delta time.

Add a second player to the two-player strategy game, introduce enemies and a turn switching system, and polish visuals with a highlight square and hover effects.

Create the blue and gold opposing dark soldier character, sketch and color via layers, then rig and animate in unity with a simple run and idle motions.

Implement a simple turn switching system in a Unity-based strategy game, letting blue and red units alternate turns with the space key, while deselecting and resetting move states.

Add a custom cursor with a dark outline and orange-gold color, rendered in front, and implement a cursor follow script with hover effects and a square highlighting the selected unit.

Add an attack system where characters deal damage to opposing units, bleed, and die with armor points. Bring life to the attack with damage popups, particles, and a screen shake.

breaks the turn-based attack system into bite-sized steps, computes enemies in range using an attack range, tracks whether the unit has attacked, and visually indicates attackable enemies with weapon icons.

Implement an attacking system by casting an overlap circle to find enemy units, compute damage from attack damage minus armor, apply defense damage, reduce health, and destroy defeated units.

Learn to make attacks feel juicier in unity by adding damage icons, pop animations, and particle effects that spawn at attack positions and destroy themselves.

Add screen shake to attacks by animating the camera with a trigger-driven shake in Unity's animator, and reuse death particles as prefabs to boost polish.

Section four guides adding a village to drive goals for purchasing archers and flying creatures, with a UI logo showing turn and a stats menu for health, armor, damage.

Design and animate dark village concepts that generate gold per turn to buy characters, export sprites and prefabs, and enhance scenes with gradients, lighting, and moving clouds to add depth.

Create characters for your 2D strategy game in Unity, including an archer, a fast flying unit, and a king, with unit scripts, prefabs, and health for combat and game over.

Create and arrange Unity UI elements like health and gold indicators, faction flags, and a turn indicator using canvases, images, and buttons for a clean, responsive game interface.

Implement functional user interface by switching player indicators, updating the king's health user interface, and calculating per-turn gold from villages, using Unity and village scripts.

Create a Unity barrack system that toggles blue and red menus by player turn, enables purchases of characters and villagers with goals, deducts costs, updates UI, and instantiates purchased items.

Implement a world-space stats panel that appears on right-click, shows health, armor, attack damage, and defense damage, positions at a top-right offset, moves with the unit, and updates on damage.

Finish your 2d strategy game by adding sound effects with Audacity, implementing them in Unity, adding background music, and establishing win and lose states.

Create custom sound effects for a 2D strategy game in Unity by recording with a microphone, editing in Audacity with pitch and tempo, then importing into the project.

Implement and manage sound effects and music in a Unity 2D strategy game using audio sources, clips, and scripts to trigger death, damage, selection, and movement sounds.

Learn to implement a win state in Unity by displaying faction-specific victory panels when a king dies, and providing a restart button to reload the scene.

Explore ideas to extend your Unity-based 2D strategy game, from a main menu and credits page to new characters, mods, maps, and backstories.