Get my 12 hour course on how to make 2D games with Unreal Engine: tinyurl.com/Ultimate2D

Would've killed to have an all-in-one guide like this when I first started experimenting with 2D characters in Unreal. Even now, this will be a helpful reminder for me with any new project to make sure all these settings are correct. Thank you for all the work you do providing resources for 2D character devs in Unreal :]

Fun fact - you can just use Scalable quality settings when setting up the project (on the window before you make a new project) and it will default to lower settings you mention in the video. So motion blur off, forward rendering and AA off. Not that it takes that much time to change in projects settings but its a few clicks less if you make a lot of projects :v

@CobraCode

19 күн бұрын

Awesome advice, thanks for sharing :)

You are the only one who teaches 2d unreal engine really well! Thank you 😊

Unbelievably helpful, thank you!

Bro, awesome, as always!

Your timing is perfect! I start to make an 2D Pixel art game for my first project in UE5. Even the first two minutes help me a lot so far. Thanks a lot 😄

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

Awesome :D Glad to hear that it was helpful

@aegean410

10 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode your welcome and thank you again

Every single time a new video drops, I learn something from you. It is just amazing. Thanks for sharing this :)

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

Thank you :D Glad you're enjoying the learning process!

thanks for this! I've been trying to set defaultlitmat directly in the sprite, and creating my own mats, then I realied because of your video that I needed to set it within the BP I made for the char, not the individual sprites

very helpful thank you for the info

This was extremely helpful, the lack of help with 2d games is disturbing, so your channel is perfect

Thank you sir! - this fixed weird visual artifacts on my sprites.

Thanks! Best channel ;))

I found your channel today and you're doing a great job. A personal request, if you find time to do tutorials on top down 2d development, we would appreciate it. Specifically how lighting and building transparency would work when entering a building. Thanks!

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

Thank you and thanks for the suggestion. 2D Top down is something I want to cover more, however it's not that high on my priority list right now :( It's gonna be a while, but I'll eventually get back to that.

Thanks

Can we please have a particle system tutorial for 2d games for unreal 😃?

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

Thanks for the suggestion :) By particle system do you mean using Niagara with 2d sprites or just creating a blueprint that plays out a flipbook animated VFX, like with this asset pack for example? ansimuz.itch.io/gothicvania-magic-pack-12

@salomon_gutierrez

10 ай бұрын

I was interested in this as well. I think that getting as much of UE's features to work(as much as possible) the same way for both 2D - 3D will give the engine a more solid workflow, and perhaps over time, greatly reduce the friction for 2D development. If not work the same way, use the same tools for similar purposes, like using Niagara for particles instead of just flipbooks. Perhaps examining physics could also be interesting. 🙂

@maan_69

10 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode Thanks for the reply! And yes I mean Niagra particles.. I also made a particle system for blood particles in a 2d project.. it worked quite nicely even with ortho camera.. I am sure someone professional like you can unlock a whole alot for us with this type of tutorial :)

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

@@maan_69 Niagra is definitely an area I'm not professional with at all xD I'm actually still mostly using the old legacy particle system since I'm much more comfortable with it. Need to find the time to learn it myself first before I'm able to teach it. But in general when it comes to particle effects like that there isn't really a big difference between 2D and 3D since even many 3D effects just use 2D sprites for those.

This video picked my interest. Back in 2020 I made a 2D demo in Unreal, it looked gorgeous but performance wise it was awful… one of my friends who downloaded it could barely play it and even my own pc (I call it jokingly quantic lol as I mainly do 3d art) started working quite heavily, fans were to the maximum so at the time I thought “well, unreal just isn’t good for 2d”… I’ve been learning Unity for about a week now because I want to make some classic arcade games but somehow wanted to search again for performance hacks on Unreal and got to your channel, I’ll give this a try, if this runs on my dad’s pc I’ll definitely stick with unreal even for 2D but if it doesn’t I guess I’ll keep learning Unity only for 2D games

@CobraCode

5 ай бұрын

Hey! I actually got a 2D only game running at 300 FPS on a steam deck as you can see from my tweet: twitter.com/CobraCodeDev/status/1743588186104967254 The method doesn't change all that much from this video, but there will actually be a new video some time this month which goes through the entire process of making a 2D game and the same optimization steps which I used for the tweet.

@CrusaderGabriel

5 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode this seems really awesome! Definitely gonna subscribe and check out your videos to see what I’m missing (also to relearn paper2d because well it’s been 3.5 years since I made that demo). I can still do 3D stuff in Unreal, definitely I feel comfortable with the engine which is why I would love to keep all my work in the same engine. btw stuff I want to make like I mentioned: classic arcade games from the Atari era like centipede, up to beat em ups like golden axe, TMNT, etc. Probably Unreal will be overkill for the Atari ones, but for the latter ones may work just fine

@CobraCode

5 ай бұрын

@@CrusaderGabriel Thank you :D Yeah it's definitely overkill for super basic stuff... but in the end if it runs at 60FPS+ and you can get the package size down to 50MB it doesn't really matter. We're at a point with technology where we have absolute abundance of computing power and storage space, so the only problem is that it 'feels' wrong to use Unreal Engine for these. Beat em ups you can make for sure! I'm actually working on a 2D/3D hybrid beat em up you can also find on the channel

thanks a lot i I have my answer.

I can see the lights on my sprites in editor but if I go in alt+shift+k (right view mode) or I press play I can no longer see the light. I can see the lights also if I F8 while in play mode. Any idea why?

i am curious what your take on the recent(experimental) changes Epic has made to the Orthographic camera(to bring it into parity with perspective), and whether or not it is still better to stick to perspective.

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

I haven't had any hands on time with it yet, but it seems promising. I personally don't really care too much about orthographic mode since in the end most of the games I wanna make are 2D/3D hybrid games anyway. Some people seem to be more comfortable with orthographic for 2D though, so it is something I should look into.

@salomon_gutierrez

10 ай бұрын

I was about to coment on the same thing. The recent changes on ortho cam could have interesting benefits for 2D games. I hope it keeps improving!

Is it possible to create a tileset linked to a blueprint class? For instance, I have a "spike" sprite that deals damage to the player. Instead of manually placing it in the world, is there a way to already add it during the creation of the tilemap?

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

You can create a tilemap component inside of a blueprint, however it's still marked as BETA and can therefore be buggy (Development on paper 2d stopped though, so it'll be in beta forever). I haven't looked at this much yet and think there probably isn't much from the tilemap exposed to blueprints that you can interact with. I imagine if you could iterate over the tiles though you could probably look for the 'spike' typed tiles and on begin play exchange them with actual spike blueprints. However you'll probably have to create a custom editor plugin or change the code of tile maps to make that possible.

I used Orthographic camera so I could get axis-based sprite sorting and have my character be able to both walk in front of and behind a tree, fence-post, etc., based on their position relative to it on the up/down axis of the camera view. Is this simply not necessary to get the same effect when you use perspective camera?

@CobraCode

9 ай бұрын

Yeah you don't have to worry about any of that when just using the perspective camera. I think though in top down games you'll still have to fight with that, but that applies to both camera systems.

Hi, i want to develop a 2d game using PaperZD plugin but i get an error, when i try to create a C++ class inherited from PaperZdCharacter. I get linking error from live coding and cant compile the game. Do you know any solution?

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

Hey, sorry but I'm not familiar with that error. HeavyBullets, the creator of the plugin is in our discord though, so if you ask in the development-forum or development-general channel he might take a look at it.

I cant get my sprite to cast a shadow is there any reason why?

How to get rid of the excitement of sprites when slowly moving the camera? As I understand it, need to apply the so-called pixel perfect camera, but I did not find how to implement it

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

Hey, I haven't looked into this too much myself yet. But a user on our discord shared his code for a supposedly pixel perfect camera setup. github.com/tanis2000/Unreal-Test2DPlatformer

Btw Is it possible to use not pixel art for the characters? Can I use any other style? Thanks!

@CobraCode

10 ай бұрын

Yeah you can! I personally haven't tried it yet but you can check out OUVIO's channel. he does hand drawn art in his devlogs.

@brandonjacksoon

10 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode thank you :))

Can someone tell me where can I find the skeleton and environment assets showed at 1:54?

@CobraCode

8 ай бұрын

Here you go: www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/ja/product/stylized-viking-village jesse-m.itch.io/skeleton-pack

What about HD 2D sprites example streets of rage 4? Not a fan of pixel art at this time. Just had too much consumption of it.

@CobraCode

9 ай бұрын

Hey. There are many reasons I'm using pixel art over hand drawn art. I personally like the style. There are many more assets available which can be downloaded for free, so that students can follow along. It's the only thing I can also draw by myself to some extend. But I understand that many students are also interested in exploring hand drawn art and I do wanna look into that for sure!

@KalponicGames

9 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode just asking if the set up is different than settings of pixel art in unreal. In unity it is different for hand drawn n pixel art different work flow.

@CobraCode

9 ай бұрын

Hey, I believe the only difference are a few texture settings@@KalponicGames

For some reason my art's coming out all pixelated and blurry, it's slightly clearer up close but still messy looking, I can't seem to figure out what the issue is.

@CobraCode

5 ай бұрын

Are you using pixel art or line art?

@thearchitect5405

5 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode Line art. Does this not work with line art? I was really hoping it would.

@thearchitect5405

5 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode Is it actually not possible for line art? I'm not great with pixel art and had a bunch of lineart planned out for a game. I'm also already familiar with Unreal, it'd take me some time to figure out Unity.

@CobraCode

5 ай бұрын

@@thearchitect5405 It should also work with line art, but the texture settings are probably gonna be a bit different. 'Apply Paper 2D Texture Settings' assumes that you use pixel art. In your case you might want to use a bilinear or trilinear texture filter. This video by JayTheDevGuy might also be interesting for you: kzread.info/dash/bejne/pWiYpNiMmpzAoNI.html

@thearchitect5405

5 ай бұрын

@@CobraCode It's not letting me add an imgur link, but it's pretty blurry and pixelated when it's not close up. I checked out that other video and unfortunately they seem to have the same issues, just that their lineart uses thicker lines and less of them. I decided since I probably won't be finding any fix, I tried to build my camera around it by keeping the character close, and panning in the direction they run in and zooming out slightly while still having them take up a large amount of the screen, just on the side you're not running towards, then recentering and zooming back in when they stop for half a second. Now that I'm moving on to the next steps I was wondering, I have some placeholder sprites down for some bushes and trees but they intersect with the floor. Is it possible for me to make it so that sprites appear in front of all 3D objects aside from other sprites? I know they're technically also 3D so I'm unsure.

Hello Unreal World , Bye Unity