Hi there,

I recently decided I would like to create a video game and was looking for the opinion of some people a bit more experienced in the matter to give me some guidence on a starting direction,
I would like to have a game that incorporates a (32bit -graphic style) 2D- platformer for about 80% of the game, and for rest I'd like to have the player in a relatively pretty 3D first person view. However I'm not sure which development tools I should start getting familar with in order to achieve this, I hear Unity is very pretty and reasonably easy to use for 3D types, however I also heard it can be tricky to do other things with it. I suspect the Unreal Development Kit probably isn't suited for creating 2D anything in. Which leaves me with XNA, is that the best choice for somthing like this? Heck, does anyone know if its even possible to create two seperate styles that change without having to exit out of the executable, obviously it will have to load a different level/set of rules (I'm hoping I can do it in one executable, rather than having to load a seperate executable for the 3D sections).

I should mention that I have a little bit of experience with C#, and some experience with an object-orientated programing language that's relatively obscure (Jade) and I don't expect this to be easy. I'm just hoping for someone who has experience with this sort of problem to help point me in the right directions.

Cheers.

I think the easier thing to do would be to have your whole gameplay "world" as a 3d environment and have a fixed axis camera to simulate 2d graphics.

thank you for the Reply Yewbie,

do you happen to know which development tools would best allow me to do this? I imagine the sky is the limit with XNA, but If I can get somthing prettier for less work than I'd rather try my hand at that.

I can't really reply because outside of directx5-9 I haven't used anything for more than just sample or test applications, hopefully someone here can reply with a more authoritative response for you =)

unity is good for the 2d simulation

thanks everyone for the responses,

I'll have a play around in Unity and UDK and see how things go.