Start making 2D Games in Unreal Engine 5 - Paper 2D Basics

most developers using Unreal Engine have probably toyed with the idea of making a 2d game at one point or another but quickly gave up on it after finding out that there's a lack of information about paper 2D I've dedicated the last year and a half of my life on figuring out how to make 2D and 2d3 hybrid games in Unreal Engine and if you're a regular viewer of my channel you've probably seen some of my project-based tutorials about paper 2D however with this video I want to start a short tutorial series talking about different aspects of paper 2D in a way that allows me to go into more detail in this first episode I'll cover what paper 2D even is and what state it's currently in in the words of Epic Games paper 2D is a Sprite based system for creating 2D and 2D 3D hybrid games entirely within Unreal Engine it allows you to use most of the Unreal Engine features you know and love together with Sprites to create a really unique look for your games you may or may not know this but there are already a couple of great games that have been created using this technology and I made a video introducing all of them a couple of months ago paper 2D is active in all Unreal Engine projects by default and you can get started right away without a need to install any additional packages to understand what we can do with paper 2D we first need to do a quick rundown of the different asset types it provides the most important ones are paper flip books Sprites tile maps and tile sets you can create these assets simply by right clicking in your content drawer however they will be blank if you create them this way it's much more common to Simply right-click a texture asset and create Sprites or tile sets this way since it will automatically link them to the texture to import a texture you can simply drag an image file into your content drawer however there are some people who have issues with this and I'll make a separate video talking with all the different options we have for importing images as a part of this series also you should always apply paper to the texture settings before using a texture with paper 2D the first asset type we need to understand is the Sprite you can simply turn a single texture into a Sprite or extract sprite from a Sprite sheet once created a Sprite asset can be double clicked to show all the available settings here you can do things such as adding additional texture as a normal map setting the material setting the pixel per unit or the Pivot Point I plan to talk in more detail about the settings in a different episode a Sprite can simply be dragged into the level and will be converted to a Sprite actor this means that we have access to all of the default actor properties in the details window under the hood a Sprite is basically just a planar mesh with a material attached to it Sprites can of course also be used within a blueprint which makes it easy to create objects you'd like to use in your levels like this one-way platform which you can jump through from the bottom but can't fall through from the top the next asset type we want to take a look at are flip books you can think of a flipbook in Unreal Engine similarly to how you'd think about one in real life it's basically just a collection of images or in the case of Unreal Engine Sprites that are shown one by one to create the illusion of movement the easiest way to create a flipbook asset is to select multiple Sprites in your content drawer which you can do by holding shift or control and clicking them then right clicking one of them and selecting create flipbook when you double click a flipbook asset and open it up you can see an editor window with all the parameters we have access to the most important one is frames per second since changing this will adjust how fast the animation is playing thank you some Sprite sheets you can download will come with a note stating the desired FPS but otherwise you'll have to just play around with it and see what feels right flipbooks have many different applications but first and foremost they use them to animate your playable characters and enemies when used inside of a blueprint a flipbook has many functions we can call to change its Behavior this is what allows us to change the current animation playback speed and many more things to match our character's Behavior but flipbooks are also useful for other animated objects such as the spring launcher they can also easily be used with Sprite sheets of explosions dust clouds and other visual effects to be used in a similar way as a particle effect let's now have a look at tile sets a tile set is basically just a collection of tiles pulled from a texture to be used within a tile map the most practical way to create a tile set acid is to import the texture of a tile map right click it and click on create tile set you can double click a tile set to open the editor the most important setting here is the tile size if you download an asset it might come with a note that lets you know the tile size otherwise you'll have to use some Trend error you can also set the collision at other settings here however I'll go into more detail on this in a follow-up video some people experience nasty gaps in their tile sets but since I personally haven't experienced that issue yet I'll need to spend some more time researching this from my current understanding though this can be fixed by right-clicking a tile set and clicking on condition tile sheet texture other settings that might help are border margin and per tile spacing let's move on to talking about tile Maps tile maps are basically 2D grids which can have multiple layers that you can fill out with blocks from a tile sets to build your levels a tile map can be created by right clicking on a tile set when you double click it you get an editor window that allows you to paint the cells of your tile map one thing I need to mention is that the tile map editor can lead Unreal Engine to crash consistently for a small number of people but this seems to mostly happen when closing the editor window of the tile map so an easy way to work around that is to just always keep the window open the most important options in the time map editor are switching the active tile set Ting the map width and height and switching between layers again I'll make a follow-up video going into more detail on all of this once you're done designing your tile map you can simply drag it out into the level to be able to confirm if your collisions are set up correctly you can click the show button and then select Collision if no collisions show up you'll have to go back to your tile set and add some Collision box tile Maps can also be used within blueprints so you could create a collage of multiple tile Maps or extend them with blueprint logic however you can see a warning letting us know that paper tile map component is in beta and possibly unstable this brings us to the next big topic of this video the current state of paper 2D sadly official development on paper 2DS stopped many years ago and it's stuck in a Perpetual beta state with many features being incomplete and not well maintained but despite that I believe there's no better time to get started than now the fact that you can easily look at the code of all Unreal Engine modules and make changes to them is what led the community to take the further development of paper 2D into their own hands recently paper ZD has become a free plugin on the Unreal Engine Marketplace and it makes working with 2D so much easier through providing an animation graph and notify support there are also paid plugins on the marketplace such as the pixel 2D platformer engine and pixel 2D top-down engine I personally haven't tried these yet but I've heard a lot of good things about them they also come with support for animation graphs and notify similarly to paper ZD but also changed up the tile map editor to make it easier to work with and added functionality such as destructible or animated tiles with some practice you should also be able to make small changes to the existing pay-per-2d classes or make child classes from them to extend the functionality by yourself there's actually a great video by Rocky Mallet where he talks about how he created his own time map editor and added new features to it back in Android Engine 4 we even had a paper 2D starter template however this has been removed with the official release of Unreal Engine 5 alongside many other less popular templates this has made it a lot harder for people to get into paper 2D so I do plan on making new paper to the temple for armor Legend 5 by myself and maybe provided as a patreon benefit in the future even though epic games isn't directly working on paper 2D anymore they are supporting developers who are using it from the sidelines through epic Mega grants both of the plugins I mentioned before received an epic Mega Grant and there are also many paper 2D games which are getting financial support from epic games but even then it really depends on many factors of making 2D games and Android engines right for you or if you'd be better off using some other engine like Unity but if you've been curious for a while I believe you should at least give it a try and decide for yourself big thanks to my patrons for supporting the creation of these videos [Music]

Channel: Cobra Code

Views: 30,111

Keywords: game development, unreal engine, gamedev, ue4, ue5, game dev, unreal engine 5, paper 2d, paperzd, unreal engine paper 2d, unreal engine 2d, unreal engine 2d game, unreal engine 2d tutorial, unreal engine 2d game tutorial, unreal engine paper 2d tutorial, unreal engine beginner tutorial, unreal engine 5 paper 2d, ue5 paper 2d, unreal engine 5 2D tutorial, unreal engine 5 2d platformer, unreal engine 5 2d beginner tutorial, unreal engine pixel 2d

Id: TBpbGaEERI0

Length: 9min 22sec (562 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023