As part of our Unity 4.3 announcement here at Unite ’13, we’re thrilled to show off our native support for 2D development. Our users have been making 2D games for many years at this stage, and we felt it was about time we stepped up and acknowledged that fact, and brought native support for Sprites and related 2D workflows to Unity.

With the knowledge that Unity users love making 2D games in Unity – evidenced by some incredible titles (see BattleHeart, Tumbledrop, Ski Safari, Bad Piggies, Year Walk, to name but a few) as well as some fantastic tools in our Asset Store – we decided to look at how to make the Unity workflow you already know and better support 2D. In future you’ll see a lot more in these tools, but as part of the first release you can expect features such as –

New Sprite type, with an editor that will auto slice your 2D graphics for you

Upgraded Animation window with Dopesheet style view and quicker parameter animation

Integration with the Animator to easily create states for 2D animated characters

An integrated 2D physics engine with rigidbodies, colliders, joints

We have also created a demo project to show our beta users how they can make a game with these new tools. Our Learn team has created this in much the same way we expect users to use our 3D tools, so we hope it’ll be both familiar and reassuring to those wondering how these 2D workflows make sense in a 3D engine.

We look forward to seeing what you create with these new tools and workflows in Unity, have fun!