Secondly, as great as GameMaker: Studio is, it has severe limitations when compared to Unity3D. For example, in Unity, you can set up variables in your scripts that you can then access from the inspector, and essentially fine-tune certain things within the editor without having to recode a tone of values. You can even do it while the game is running!
GameMaker has no such option. In fact, its scripting is really rather limited. Do I think it was a waste of $50? Certainly not, but I do wish I had thought about it a bit longer before buying it. It's great for games, just not the one I want to make right now.
Anyway, that's not the point of this post. I'm wondering, would people find Cuboidz to be better in a 2.5D style, similar to Rochard? Or should I stick with the 2D entirely, which can also be done in Unity?
Another reason I'm considering Unity is because it allows for publishing to a wider range of Linux distros, whereas GameMaker officially only supports Ubuntu. There really are a lot more things one can do with Unity!
Anyway, what does everyone think?
"Better" is very subjective. The important question is, do you have the budget and resources to make Cuboidz into a 2.5D game similar to the game you posted? It's definitely a [i]lot[/i] more asset-hungry than the existing version. If you're a solo dev, you're adding months, if not years, to the schedule to try to create that 3D content yourself. If you contract it out, it's definitely going to cost a lot more than a few simple sprites will cost. Would the game be fundamentally different, gameplay-wise, or would it be purely an aesthetic change? If purely aesthetic, you can just write it as pluggable back-ends, do active development on the pure 2D back-end, and if budgetary concerns change focus efforts onto the 3D backend. That way, you don't inflate your schedule only to realize, months in, that you lack the resources to complete it.