Despite all the flak it gets (some of it very well deserved), Flash is still really great at a few things. One of the truly great things about it is the display tree.

As the name implies, it's like a tree, or better yet, a bunch of folders on your desktop. Here's what the display tree might look like for a simplified version of a fruit coder level:

root

- UI buttons

- - Menu button

- - Pause button

- - Toolbox button

- Countertop

- - Puck

- - If statement

- - return bracket

- - Pet

- Background holder

- - Background image

While unity does this, sorta, it's just not quite like Flash. In Flash, we can dispatch a button click event from the Toolbox Button element, and listen for it at the UI Buttons and root levels. We can squash and rotate the Countertop clip and everything under it will squash and rotate. Best part is that we can put a big, screen-covering movieclip above UI buttons and lock everything down (if we need really truly absolutely modal dialog box for some reason).

To emulate this in Unity, I built Cinch 2D. It was last tested with Unity 4.3, so it needs a bit of updating to compile with the latest Unity. If anyone wants to contribute, or code review it, please do.

Here 'tis: https://github.com/kyallbarrows/Cinch_4-3