When comparing Superpowers vs Unity 2D, the Slant community recommends Unity 2D for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Unity 2D is ranked 7th while Superpowers is ranked 71st. The most important reason people chose Unity 2D is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Collaborative
You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time.
Pro Supports both 2D and 3D
This isn't a 3D with 2D on the side type of engine. The scene-editor supports both 3D and 2D views, allowing ease of use no matter what type of game your making.
Pro Plugin based
The community can develop and release their own plugins to add additional features making game development easier. All of these plugins can be easily downloaded in the app.
Pro Lots of handy built-in editors
It's got a scene-editor, cubic-model creator, text-editor, 2D image / animation importer, and a very useful tile-map editor.
Pro Easy to use programming language
Games can be published to the web with good performance, and the game-framework utilizes TypeScript to make programming games a little bit nicer.
Pro Built into Unity 4.3+
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.
Pro Integrates with Mecanim
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.
Pro Sprite Sheet and Bone based animation supported
Both types of 2D animation for game development are supported in Unity’s system and can be used interchangeably in the timeline.
Pro Easily change sprites dynamically
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.
Cons
Con Not frequently updated
Although it's got very nice features as is, and the team does respond to issues at a pretty good rate, the engine itself takes a little while to get updates. It's a 3-4 person team, and they need to work jobs on the side in order to bring in income.
Even though the updates come out a little slower than other engines, the team is still very much committed to the project and still support it well.
Con Lacks critical features
- Vertices can't be animated, so you can't have ANY organic feel (like... lungs breathing).
- Parent bone can't be animated without affecting the children. This is especially impeding for organic feel, again.
- No option to show & unshow assets (or it is hidden), like for switching weapon on your character for exemple.
Con Poor script interface for texture atlases
Accessing individual sprites within an atlas texture is possible at runtime, but requires use of the Resources folder subsystem.