Starling vs Unity 2D

Starling is just 12k lines of code and doesn't try to do everything — but what it does, as efficient as possible.

With Feathers, you can easily add great user interfaces to your games — or even create business apps with Starling.

Starling is available for free with code available on GitHub.

Forum is always active with knowledgeable developers and with lot of inside info, and post mortems.

With UI, you can design it in Flash Professional (powerful 2D editor), export to swf file, use GAF convert swf file to gaf file, finnally, load gaf file to Starling. GAF can convert a lot of file swf to one atlas. Alway use same resource in design files (fla) to optimize atlas size, avoid duplicate asset in atlas.

You can use flash to create animation for starling.

Let the GPU do the rendering, the CPU has more important tasks to do.

It can be exported to web flash player, iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X

Using AIR's native extensions any native code that can be written can be run and used by the game engine.

New features are added regularly.

Starling can run more animated display objects than Unity2D and many others frameworks at 60 fps.

2D game creation was a major feature request from the Unity community and was added with version 4.3. 2D is provided in both the Pro and Free distribution of Unity.

Mecanim brings state machines and blending to 2D bone animation. The state machine editor allows for designers and programmers to visually create a Finite State Machine (FSM) to control when animations should play. Mecanim also allows for blending so an animation can transition smoothly between two states without the need of in between frames made by an animator.

Both types of 2D animation for game development are supported in Unity’s system and can be used interchangeably in the timeline.

Usually used for character customization, programmers can change any sprite in a bone animation at runtime easily by referencing the bone and loading the new sprite from the resources folder.