Hey guys,

New to this forum ;).

I'm really interested in making a 2D game in a beat 'em all style in the vein of the "Devil May Cry series". Meaning that I would like to have a complex set of moves and precise movements. I've been copying 2D games in C++ for 1 year now (the biggest game I did was recreating Rayman (the first game - the first few levels, using Box2D and with my school's engine) and it's going fine but I would like to now try my hand at a bigger game and I've decided to use Unity this time.

Here's a video showing a bit the set of movements available in Devil May Cry if you don't know about those games:

I have essentially 2 questions:

1) Do you people happen to know of any references/books talking about such subjects as I don't seem to find much about anything on this subject online? The tutorials I found always have rather rudimentary controls.

2) Using both Box2D and now Unity, I'm finding that the physics is very similar. Do developpers use other systems than that? Should I approach a game with very precise movement controls with forces and velocities or am I better off trying something else?

Thanks a bunch for your time and advice!

1. Game Programming Gems is the best I know of, would be interested in suggestions from others also.

2. For characters you want precision, and most likely not physics. Try to reserve the physics system for cases of realistic physics, like vehicles and whatnot. Look into curve-based movements and effective tweening for nice combat effects.

Thanks for your reply, man!

I've found this on YouTube if you're interested although it's just a start, it's a tutorial about using raycasting to do all the movements of a 2D character (handles slopes, platforms, wall jumps...) :

I'm looking into Game Programming Gems right away and I hadn't heard about tweening, it seems interesting too.

If anyone has other ideas, feel free to give us your thoughts.

as Cmac said, you should avoid using physics for this sort of thing imo.

So some thoughts etc:
Raycasting uses the physics engine to shoot "rays" that collide with objects (this requires that all object have colliders, otherwise you won't and hits and hence no data from the hits)

I feel that what you want to do isn't really that much about physics or more complex movements at all. I would say this is more a matter of animations.
What I mean is that to trigger that sort of attack-combo etc, it is more a matter of triggering animations when a certain combination of buttons are pressed and some conditions are met (such as enemy is within attack range).

You don't really need to use physics in this type of game because it doesn't try to implement realism in the game (Stay up in air for 10 seconds while performing attacks isn't really realistic).
You could still use some physics for basic collissions and triggers though.

Fun fact: Why you feel that the physics in unity is similar to box2D is actually because Unity implements Box2D for it's 2D physics (Box2D is arguably the most popular 2d physics library out there).

Finally: I would recommend you to get accustomed to using Unity first, learn about animations and how to trigger them, try using collission and raycasting for different triggers and to "attach" the character to the ground when he isn't jumping etc.

Good luck!