for Unity I'm using is 2D Toolkit and Playmaker. A little bit of background, I have made completed games before, usually assuming all roles but composer myself, but I have never used Unity to create anything on my own up until now, and the reason I'm looking at using it is because of how it seemingly ports to everything (in this case, namely mobile) while still maintaining a relatively low overhead. That said, I'm very much more of an artist than a developer, but I really enjoy the building of games than the asset creation of. Having said that, using coding languages is almost beyond me, and although I can use scripting languages, I'm sure I use plenty of work-arounds. I say that because I feel like what I want to do would be much easier to make in something like GameMaker, but I really want to see if this can be achieved in Unity. In a horizontally scrolling game, you jump vertically on the Y axis, and rigidbodied assets have collision at the very top of the object. Also? You could fall off the map. But with a game that scrolls vertically downward, I can't exactly have the character fall down the Y axis. I can translate the player object down the Y axis if I disable gravity, but it doesn't look like it's jumping. Plus, the player needs to stop dead center in the middle of pond rocks/lilypads, which will also be sprites. If I have the rigidbody enabled, the player character just sits on top of the sprite as opposed to landing in the middle. I'm looking to do this in the most effective/efficient way, so while I'm sure I could cheat in the animations by just having the character's jumping sprites increase upward on the Y axis in the pngs, I can't see that being effective for longer jumps, and the farthest distance is jumping over 2 rocks and landing on the 3rd. Additionally, if you time your jump incorrectly and jump where there is no rock, you fall in the water, so there still has to be something there to detect a miss (and not just fall into a void). I'm thinking maybe an invisible object would go there, but I could be wrong.

For detecting when they jump into a hole just make a script to kill them if they land on a a specific type of block.