Topdown Engine
PRICE £65/$80 | DEVELOPER More Mountains | WEBSITE topdown-engine.moremountains.com
Unity is a fantastic engine for creating top-down games, and there’s no better plugin to get it done than Topdown. With a range of different features that are perfectly suited to creating this type of game, new and experienced users are given easy-to-use tools that work straight out of the box.
The plugin centres around a well-built and finely tuned character control. It includes movement, collision detection, slope handling and jumps to make sure the character moves around the scene as it should. Additionally, weapons are fully supported with controls for aiming, charging and, of course, firing. Characters can be created and then tweaked using the inspector, and if you’re ever not sure where to start, you can simply use one of the numerous examples as a starting point.
Taking your game to the next level is possible through the More Mountains system,
“USERS ARE GIVEN EASY-TO-USE TOOLS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BOX”
which delivers a wide range of different effects including screen shakes, freeze frames, chromatic aberration and particles. All of these types of effects would take an absolute age to code from scratch, so this plugin stands out as an incredible time saver.
If all of the individual tools are still a bit much to get your head around, then thankfully there’s a ton of content, which includes demo levels, that is good to go straight away. Once you’re ready to either start from scratch or adjust a preset level, you can use the built-in tools to move platforms, set up rooms, and even create destructible crates. What more could you want? Being able to handcraft or procedurally generate these levels gives an additional amount of creative control.
Topdown works on any platform, including mobile and desktop, so you can be sure that your game will have wide appeal. And as it only focuses on gameplay mechanics rather than rendering, it’s compatible with any of the three primary rendering pipelines that are available. Documentation is abundant with simple-to-follow guidelines and specifications.