Build incredible 2D games
Immersive 2D worlds
Create diverse organic or grid-based worlds with the Tilemap and SpriteShape features. Empower level designers with artist-friendly workflows and procedural tiles and brushes.
Lifelike and engaging 2D characters
Bring your game to life with engaging flipbook, cutout, and skeletal 2D characters. Enhance character workflows with multilayered source art, and animate with FK, IK, and blending.
Stunning 2D graphics
Render amazing 2D visuals with 2D Lights, shadows, and post-processing, with support for deep customization with Shader Graph and the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
Advanced 2D physics
Simulate realistic 2D physics with highly optimized colliders, joints, and effectors, plus efficient simulation controls.
Out of the box, Unity offers user-friendly 2D features that work seamlessly together.

Build immersive 2D worlds
Create immersive 2D worlds directly in the Editor using artist-friendly and powerful features. Make rich, free-form organic worlds driven by splines with 2D SpriteShape. Build large grid-based worlds with 2D Tilemap using square, hexagonal, or isometric tiles.
Empower your artists with procedurally driven SpriteShapes, Tilemap tiles, and brushes. Use code to generate complete worlds or boost productivity by automating various aspects of painting and layout. Both 2D SpriteShape and the 2D Tilemap Editor offer complete APIs, documentation, and compatibility with many other Unity systems.

Create lifelike 2D characters
Build 2D characters right in Unity using the 2D suite’s complete character creation and animation features.
Work with multilayered source art using the 2D PSD Importer. This imports, separates, and slices up the various parts of a character, then automatically reconstructs it as a Prefab ready for further rigging and animation.
Create flipbook characters with a powerful asset pipeline, and start animating almost immediately using automatically generated keyframes.
Create deformable characters using skin and bones. You can perform partial or full character skin swaps efficiently at runtime, and 2D Inverse Kinematics lets you animate 2D characters in the Editor.

Render stunning 2D graphics
Render atmospheric visuals that bring a scene to life with 2D Lights. Play with the contrast of lights’ colors, intensity, and placement to build a mood, and control interaction with sprites using native Sorting Layers.
Create depth in graphics with highly expressive 2D Shadow features that add depth and texture to a scene.
Push the limits of 2D graphics with custom shaders in Shader Graph that incorporate your very own rendering algorithm, and create dynamic scene effects with VFX Graph. For a dash of nostalgia, render everything in Pixel Perfect, which is supported natively in the Unity Editor.

Optimized 2D physics engine
Unity comes with dedicated and optimized 2D physics, with many more features and optimizations to power your game.
2D Colliders enable accurate detection of your sprites’ shapes, from primitive to custom shapes. If they also include a Rigidbody 2D, the objects will react to gravity and behave as solid objects.
Objects anchored to another object also can benefit from physics with 2D Joints, adding realism to a sliding platform, chain, spring, or car.
Do you want to simulate buoyancy or magnets? 2D Effectors can add non-contact physics effects.

Foundational sprite and optimization tools
Set up and optimize art assets for your 2D projects. Slice, tile, adjust the pivot, redefine shapes, or add normal and mask texture sprites, all within the Sprite Editor.
Optimize your 2D game with Sprite Atlas, which enables you to pack your sprites into one texture to save draw calls and resize based on your target platform.
To further optimize and debug your game, you can use Unity profiling tools like the Profiler, Frame Debugger, or Rendering Debugger.

Help getting started
Access Unity’s massive user community, extensive body of frequently updated documentation, training for beginners, demos like Lost Crypt or Dragon Crashers, more advanced training like webinars, dedicated 2D forum, and other tips. Discover tools and resources to help you, at any skill level or for any project need.
Successful 2D game creators rely on Unity
Card Shark
How does a boutique indie showcase a noted artist’s hand-drawn style in an immersive 2D multiplatform game? See how Nerial’s Card Shark brought their idea to life in Unity.
Skul: The Hero Slayer
Learn how Skul: The Hero Slayer’s acclaimed pixel art adventure took shape in Unity with tools like the Tilemap Editor, Pixel Perfect camera, Sprite Atlas, and more.
Minute of Islands
See how Studio Fizbin’s massive illustrated islands unfold in Unity to achieve a grand world of depth and scale.
Forgotton Anne
Learn how ThroughLine Games used Unity to create an incredible high-quality cinematic experience in a 2D adventure platformer.
Robbie Swifthand and the Orb of Mysteries
A team of three create an engaging 2D platformer with 93 levels, 15 cutscenes and three difficulty modes. Learn how.
Tiny Bubbles
Indie dev Stu Denman created this mesmerizing, addicting puzzle game with over 160 levels using Unity’s complete and flexible toolset.
Children of Morta
How Unity helped a globally distributed 14-member team work together efficiently to combine strong story, art, and engaging gameplay in one great hack-and-slash 2D game.
forma.8
Discover how self-taught programmer Mauro Fanelli and his artist collaborator Andrea Gellato created this premium game with beautifully hand-drawn vector graphics.
Flipping Death
Find out how innovative physics allowed players to switch between two parallel worlds in this quirky adventure-platformer game.
Hearthstone
Taking the award-winning and universally loved Warcraft franchise to mobile, the team moved from in-house tech to Unity to iterate faster and reduce development time.
Cuphead
Discover how Unity helped enable the creative vision behind Cuphead’s iconic hand-drawn and inked visuals in this unique run-and-gun platformer.
Night in the Woods
Discover how Unity’s 2D solutions helped power Night in the Woods’s expressive 2D art style and breathe life into a darkly humorous world of existential stories.
Seasons after Fall
Unity 2D tools enable hand-painted graphics that set the tone in this expressive game where players control everything – the characters, environment, and even the seasons.
Phased
Tilemap and other tools helped two devs in different countries create an awesome 2D shape-shifting platformer – all in their spare time.
Resources
Discover comprehensive guides to help you get started with your own project.
2D development
The 2D game art, animation, and lighting for artists e-book is our most comprehensive development guide yet, created for Unity creators who want to make a commercial 2D game.
What’s new in the 2021 LTS
Check out the new features and improvements for artists and designers to optimize your creative workflows and build deeply immersive experiences.
Deep dive into Dragon Crashers
Discover how Dragon Crashers used Unity’s suite of native 2D Tools to fulfill ambitious goals for animation, inverse kinematics, level design, and more.
Frequently asked questions
You can follow the latest updates for our 2D solutions by visiting our Unity Platform Roadmap and share your feedback directly with the product team.
Access the Unity Documentation to find a comprehensive manual to help you start developing 2D games in Unity.
Check out the Unity Community Discussion forums to follow the latest updates and interact with 2D creators.
Advance your Unity skills with live sessions and over 750 hours of on-demand learning content designed for creators at every skill level. Check out Unity Learn here.
Choose the latest LTS version to work with the most stable, dependable, and supported version of Unity. Get started from the Unity Hub or learn more here.