Unity.Rea.ProjectVania

A Unity 6 rebuild of ProjectVania, a 2009 XNA 3.0 (C#) 2D side-scrolling platformer prototype: a Castlevania-flavored character (sprites named Morris, Shanoa, Leo and Richter) that runs, jumps, kneels, slides and wall-slides across a 16-pixel tile grid in front of a painted mountain-farmhouse backdrop, with a loose-follow camera, a slide-down typed console, a tile-painting map editor and a main menu, all wrapped in a hand-built component "Engine".

The rebuild is complete: every system the original had plays in Unity 6, matched to the original's per-frame arithmetic and verified by an end-to-end scripted run, and the repo is ready to continue development on a modern architecture (an engine-free, tested Core; data-driven tuning; everything composed in code).

Why

The original is an engine-first sandbox from 2009 whose platforming feel is worth keeping exactly:

• Per-frame, hand-tuned platforming. Acceleration 14000, a 200 px/s run cap, ground and air drag of 0.58 and 0.65 per frame, a fixed 0.6 s jump curve that rises about 76 px and that releasing the key does not shorten, a wall slide that caps at 83 px/s, a kneel on a hard landing and a slide out of a run.
• A grid you can paint while you play. One key flips the running game into a map editor: a tile palette, a cursor that scrolls the camera, left click to place a solid tile, right click to erase, and the player can be dragged around with the mouse.
• A console that is part of the game. A tilde-key console slides down over the world and runs say, yell, fade, play music, mute, console text red and friends.
• Everything is a swappable component. Texture, font, effect, audio, input, camera, scene, GUI, script and map-editor managers behind interfaces, handed to every object in one bundle.

See docs/RECONSTRUCTION.md for the full system-by-system record read from the original C# source and content files, and docs/BIBLE.md for the rebuild's brief. Work is tracked as stories under epic U.VAN-A in docs/USER_STORIES.md, written in build order.

Status

Complete. Every story of epic U.VAN-A is built and verified (Core tests, EditMode tests, a headless build and unity.ps1 capture screenshots); the BIBLE records each decision and every fixed defect of the original. The stories, in the order they were built:

• Engine-free Core, a fixed 60 Hz simulation and the command/event model
• Data-driven tuning, content and settings registry
• Project hygiene: URP, Input System, Unity.Shared, code-built scenes
• Input bindings (keyboard and Xbox pad) per game state
• The 16 px collision grid and its queries
• Player physics and action state machine
• Player animation, characters and rendering
• Map, backdrop and tile rendering
• Camera (loose, locked, cursor, free; scroll, zoom, rotate)
• Game states and the main menu
• The typed console and its script language
• HUD, message stack, fade lens and debug readout
• Audio cues, music and mute
• Map editor
• Post-process effects
• Everything the original left unwired, kept as data
• Asset parity sweep and the end-to-end scripted verification run

Build, test, run

Unity 6000.4.3f1 runs headless; nothing needs the Editor open.

Command	What it does
.\run-core-tests.ps1 [-Filter X]	The engine-free Core tests (dotnet test, no Unity)
.\unity.ps1 compile	Imports and compiles the project in batch mode
.\unity.ps1 test [-Filter X]	The EditMode tests (results in Logs\editmode.xml)
.\unity.ps1 build	The Windows player in Build\ProjectVania
.\unity.ps1 capture	Renders the game's states to Logs\Capture\*.png (needs graphics)
.\play.ps1 [-Sound] [-Build]	Launches the built player, muted unless -Sound

Architecture

Assembly	Holds
Unity.Rea.ProjectVania.Core	The rules, pure C# (noEngineReferences): the 60 Hz world, commands and events, characters, grid, camera, menu, console, HUD, editor, effects arithmetic and the settings registry
Unity.Rea.ProjectVania.Runtime	Presentation only: the code-built bootstrap, the Input System device, URP rendering, UI Toolkit views, audio
Unity.Rea.ProjectVania.Editor	Asset importers, the pipeline and scene setup, the batch build and the capture run
Unity.Rea.ProjectVania.Tests / Tests/Core.Tests	EditMode tests and the dotnet test Core suite

Every tuning figure, text and content definition is a JSON file in Assets/StreamingAssets/Settings, validated on load; state changes only through commands carrying a player id, so presentation never mutates the game.

Muted launches

play.ps1 launches muted: it sets MINDATTIC_CLI_MUTED=1 and passes -muted, so a CLI or agent starting the game never blasts audio. Pass -Sound to launch with audio, -Build to rebuild first (.\unity.ps1 build), -Wait to wait for the player to exit. Either switch works on its own when you start ProjectVania.exe (or the editor) yourself:

$env:MINDATTIC_CLI_MUTED = '1'; .\Build\ProjectVania\ProjectVania.exe
.\Build\ProjectVania\ProjectVania.exe -muted

The mute is the shared com.mindattic.unity.shared session mute: read before the first scene loads, it makes the player profile's settings report music and SFX muted for that run only, and SessionAudio silences the listener (the cue and song players follow audio.json and the console's mute, which still works underneath). The player's saved settings.json is never written, so the next normal launch has sound. The -batchmode runs in unity.ps1 (compile, test, build, capture) are not playable launches and are unaffected.

Online

The game can be played online on the shared Unity.Multiplayer kit (BIBLE, Online). Local play is unchanged; the online scene is opened with -online (or .\play.ps1 -Online) and offers Host, Join by IP, Join by code and Play alone. Up to three players each drive their own character (Morris, Shanoa, Leo) in the host's one game, kept in step by a lockstep the host orders. Assets/Scenes/Online.unity is written in code by MindAttic > ProjectVania > Rebuild Online Scene (Unity.Rea.ProjectVania.EditorTools.Online.OnlineSceneBuilder.BuildAll in batch); mp-host game smoke runs a dedicated server with two bots.

Original source

R:\Projects\_PRE_2022\_PRE_2021\_PRE_2020\_PRE_2017\ProjectVania (the fuller copy; its Engine project is the game) and R:\Projects\_PRE_2022\_PRE_2021\_PRE_2020\_PRE_2017\XNA 2D\ProjectVania (an earlier, smaller copy). Read-only reference, never edited by this project.