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

Game development & Game art/animation. Create a 2D turn by turn strategy game using Unity 2019, C# and Ps/Gimp.

4.15 (798 reviews)

Udemy

platform

English

language

Game Development

What you will learn

Create a local multiplayer 2D strategy game in Unity

Understand on a deeper level the C# fundamentals

Create 2D game art

Animate 2D characters in Unity

Make UI and sound effects

Code tile based movement

Code an attack/defense system

Code a turn by turn system

Buy & place units on a battlefield

Why take this course?

In this game dev course, you'll learn how to make a 2D turn by turn strategy game using Unity, C#, and Photoshop (or a free alternative).

Here is a list of the keys things that you will learn by watching this course:

First of all, you'll gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to create an entire game from A to Z, from art to programming to sounds to game design! By the end of the course, you'll be able to make your very own 2D local multiplayer strategy games, which you can share with family and friends.

The game we will bring to life is simple, but will teach you the fundamentals of many tactic/strategy games such as turn by turn systems, attack & defense, moving characters on grid-like environments, placing units, gaining resources and more! All with the C# programming language- if you understand the basics of coding, then this is the perfect opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of those fundamentals (such as functions, arrays, vectors, if statements) and learn extra tips and tricks related to turn by turn games.

You'll also learn how to make your own game characters. Starting with sketching, inking, and coloring using a 2D art application like Photoshop (but most of what is taught can be done using free alternatives, such as Gimp or Krita).

We will also learn how to rig and animate those characters inside of Unity using a simple bone-based method.

There will also be tutorials on particle effects, sounds, game juice, and UI. Everything that is needed to make a game will be covered in well-edited, fun, engaging videos. This course will immerse you in the life of a game creator, as you go on an epic journey to bring your visions to life.

Why learn from us?

My brother and I created this course to share our passion for making games and help others bring their unique visions to life!
We've been teaching aspiring game developers how to use Unity, code with the C# programming language, and make game art and animations for over two years. Our tutorials have been viewed by thousands and are very popular, every day we get dozens of developers thanking us for helping them out on their own game dev journey!

We've not only made tons of tutorials but we've also created plenty of games using Unity, both 2D, and 3D, on Itch io, Newgrounds, and Steam.
So we know what it's like to create a complete, polished experience from A to Z, and really want to equip you with the right tools and knowledge so you can do the same!

Screenshots

The Ultimate Guide to making a 2D strategy game in Unity - Screenshot_01

The Ultimate Guide to making a 2D strategy game in Unity - Screenshot_02

The Ultimate Guide to making a 2D strategy game in Unity - Screenshot_03

The Ultimate Guide to making a 2D strategy game in Unity - Screenshot_04

Reviews

Igal

March 11, 2024

Very amateurish. This course is made by amateur developers who have no business teaching others. They promote bad coding standards and habits. If you'd scale the example game they teach to an actual game, it would crumble under the developers sub standard coding standards. More over, when browsing the QA section, I can see lots of people asking questions about the weird coding decisions they teach, with no replies from the makers of the course. In short, I'd choose more established and experienced teachers for this sort of thing.

Vilim

February 17, 2024

There are few things missing, like there is no mention of pixels per unit stuff that was my main issue while trying to make my own version of this

Denis

December 10, 2023

Overall the course is good but it requires prior knowledge of Unity or game development as many many steps are missing in between videos.

Slugy123

September 26, 2023

Brilliant course for intermediate game devs with good explanations all around. my only complaint is that the code in the final lecture doesn't actually work as intended and requires an extra line of code to work properly.

Erik

August 20, 2023

I recently completed this course and I must say, there's value to be derived from it. For beginners or solo developers trying to get a sense of direction, it does a commendable job of outlining the key steps and considerations in the development process. It also provides a solid scope for what one should initially focus on, which I found very useful. That being said, there are a couple of areas where the course could be improved. The details in some sections could be enriched to provide more in-depth insights. Additionally, the code examples, while they demonstrate the intended functionality, can sometimes come across as a bit "sloppy". However, if you're able to look beyond these minor hitches, there's a lot of foundational knowledge to gain. All in all, it's a decent starting point for those venturing into game dev. Just remember to supplement this course with additional resources for a more rounded learning experience.

Erick

May 11, 2023

Great for Learning how to make a game. It also teaches very helpful code for the game but it could teach it a little more detailed and in depth

Pierre

January 18, 2023

I was impressed by this course and I will explain why. At the end, you will have a nice polished little game and yet, it's a bitesize course. I bought several courses on Udemy and other sites but I was impressed how it was delivered. This course does exactly what it says on the tin. No blanks, no hesitation, they just go straight to the point, through the whole creation of the game at the exact right pace. Learning takes time and effort, especially if you have a full time job, family etc... but with this course every minute is wisely spent. Teaching is a skill and believe me, they set the bar high. What did I learn with this course? I overcomplicate things, I just need to keep it simple, with clean code and put love (and effort) into my game and it will look great. Those guys are just very talented and they deserve support.

Daniel

January 10, 2023

The work these guys are doing is very inspiring, but it is important to realize that they learned from tutorials as well so the code they write is often quite sloppy and inefficient. This is a good start for prototyping and just getting up off the ground to start your game dev journey, but I would recommend going somewhere else to learn about good coding practices, clean code, design patterns, etc.

Michael

November 17, 2022

Its defenitly not a course for people just learning about C# and Unity. It leaves a lot of steps out thus requiring the student to research or figure it out. Also some unity features seem to have been changed or updated making it even harder to follow. But if you have previous knowledge of c# and unity it is possible to follow along and learn new cool information. Thank you for this course on 2D video games i'm doing my best to learn.

John

September 10, 2022

I'm a software engineer who is learning game development on the side. What immediately stuck out to me when taking this course was a lot of the coding practices. Everything is very tightly coupled, all of the scripts have mixed responsibilities. Tile, Unit, and GameMaster class know how to handle too many things. There are a lot of inefficiencies, the code very lazily iterates over every tile for any action that takes place, it works but on a bigger map performance would really start to degrade. I will give some credit, this is a way to approach development, so in that sense I feel somewhat inspired, but the truth is this doesn't scale at all. I find it ironic in the last video there are a ton of suggestions that would be nearly impossible to implement with the current setup.

Mike

July 17, 2022

Good, well presented, engaging, covers a lot of detail from beginner+ -> intermediate. Bad, skips over a couple of key bits e.g the inital camera settings. Several times was left asking "ok, but why?" Could be argued that answering all these questions would be 'hand holding', but just felt left in the dark. Course is +2 years old w/ almost go community engagement in the notes, comments, also final codebase is slightly different to the one from the videos.

Gabriel

June 15, 2022

The course is ok. I liked how he guided through the mechanics, but if you have not made multiple games in Unity this course is not for you. He leaves many bugs unfixed and leaves the viewer to fix them. If you are experienced this course is a good way to learn

Spencer

March 26, 2022

I'm always skeptical when a course bills itself as the "Ultimate Guide to..." or the "Complete Guide to..." At three hours, this course hardly scratches the surface of anything. The project you wind up with is a turn-based click-to-move-and-attack system, but hardly anything you would call a strategy game. In the final 4-minute Conclusion lecture they rapidly list all the cool stuff they DIDN'T cover--and it is those topics I would expect in an "Ultimate Guide." The course spends a fair amount of time creating the art for the game, but it is very specific to this game and not generalizable. The code demonstrated uses many non-scalable, non-best-practices (e.g., relying on the inefficient FindObjectsOfType() method) and it makes no mention of Unity's built-in Tilemap system, which offers many benefits. Overall, I think you would be better served by searching YouTube for "make strategy game in Unity" or by looking at other Udemy courses focused on Unity strategy games.

Thomas

February 24, 2022

Game idea and assets (sprites) are very nice, explanations are clear, but the code is not very clean and needs some refactoring in my opinion.

Alexander

January 23, 2022

Props to BTP for presenting material that does not appear all that commonly in these beginner-friendly courses: grid-based movement, turn-based action, mouse controls, and so forth. Even though the course is only a few hours of video, it contains a surprisingly large amount of useful material. That said, there are some significant gaps. Examples: there is a (very brief) discussion of how to rig a walk animation, but no discussion of when to trigger it. No discussion of attack animations, even though the modular characters were clearly designed with this in mind. The depth of Units in the 2D scene is a recurring issue that could easily have been addressed early on (a reasonable solution is proposed later, but it is not included everywhere it is needed, e.g. in Unit spawning). The video on setting up the Stats Canvas is missing a brief comment on sizing a World Space Canvas that would have spared me a lot of consternation. Code overall is reasonably good, but variables are unnecessarily declared as public. Although I really like BTP's quirky, psychedelic art style, I didn't get a lot of value out of the art tutorial sections. This is just a personal preference, but I find that it's best to keep coding and art classes separate to allow students to work on these distinct goals independently. Overall, this is a decent course with a lot of useful content.

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