The Best 2D Games made with Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine is mostly associated with amazing photo realistic graphics and most people forget about the fact that it is an overall great engine for making games of any type and graphic style if you were to believe the general opinion you might think that it's impossible to make 2D games in Unreal Engine however there are actually many more successful 2D games made with unreal than you might think I already made a video about this topic a year ago introducing the most obvious games however there has been a lot of new development and this video will be jam-packed with new titles and games I missed the last time around one game I'll reveal in the later half of this video can be seen as the absolute poster child for anal engine 2D it grossed over $20 million and runs at an amazing 370 FPS even on Steam deck so make sure to watch all the way through for the big reveal let's start with our first entry G Tokyo night festival is a 2d metroidvania that is available in Early Access on Steam using the Toho license on first glance it looks like a typical 2D game that was made only using Sprites and you would probably mistake it for a unity game however as I kept playing I noticed that it uses some 3D particle effects and also makes use of lighting in some areas rather than only showing unlet Sprites so it actually does make use of some 3D Unreal Engine features and mixes them with beautiful pixel art to create a unique look gsok yite Festival has won a lot of awards and was the only 2D game to be featured at unreal Fest 2023 which is where I stumbled upon it it has an estimated net revenue of $700,000 on Steam at this point but sadly there haven't been any updates in over 3 years and it looks like it will be perpetually stuck in Early Access snacko is a cozy Farming Simulator and Adventure game using 2D spreads for characters and low poly 3D models with pixelr textures for the environment it recently released on Steam Early Access and is announced to also release on switch sometime in the near future the game is being developed by a husband and wife du which they say comes with a whole different set of challenges but makes the entire process so much more rewarding and also makes for a very wholesome story snacko receives an epic Mega Grant which allowed them to make the game in a much more sustainable fashion through that Financial backing if you're not familiar with mega grants it's a program by epic games for which developers can apply to get funding with no strings attached snacko was also featured in an an Unreal Engine spotlight video where they talk about what inspired them to start this project and also their workflow utilizing both Blueprints and C++ ukio is a story- based Adventure in which the protagonist is trapped in a virtual cyber Punk world this game is still in development and there isn't a whole lot of gameplay footage available outside of the announcement trailer however it was shown off at multiple indie game events and already received a number of awards uku also received an epic Mega Grand and was featured in a developer interview that shines more light on how the game is being made sadly there are no mentions of what was used for the character sprites but the Creator elaborated a bit on how the game actually takes place in 3D space and only appears to be 2D I'm definitely looking forward to further development on this title since I really love the art style and setting I hope at this point I peaked your curiosity about unal engine 2D and made you consider learning how to make games in this style by yourself I actually released a 12-hour course that teaches you how to make 2D only and 2D 3D hybrid games with Unreal Engine 5 at this point it has over 5,000 students and is very well received I designed it so that even absolute beginners can follow along and he'll create four awesome games that teach you all you need to know about unal Engine 5 and paper 2D please check it out from the discount Link in the description octopath traveler 2 is the fourth game by Square Enix using their trademark HD 2D style this game is of course again a jrpg with turn-based combat featuring eight different stories that all come together over the course of the adventure I briefly mentioned this game in the last video when it was still in development but at this point it is released on PC switch PlayStation and will come to Xbox as well in early 2024 I believe it's fair to say that the visual style has seen drastic improvements compared to the first game and octopath 2 looks a lot crisper and cleaner the reception is overall positive and it has an estimated net revenue of about $8 million on Steam alone in my last video I mentioned a speech by the developers about octopath 1's development process that actually inspired a lot of my work and this time around I found another interview with the producer and director they share Insight on the prototyping phase of both games and their thought process while making them additionally I also found an alternative version of the speech from last time and the latter half of it goes into very interesting technical details it explains how they handled large amounts of Sprites how they optimized garbage collection and much more both of these videos are't Japanese but YouTube's close caption does a decent enough job at translating the next game I want to present still doesn't have a release date and has the tentative title of armed eats it's a beautiful SES scrolling shootter up and bullet hell with a distinct anime look that is using the latest version of unal engine 5 the developer ramun shared a lot of in development footage on Twitter over the last couple of years and was also able to run the game on Steam without any issues for the characters in animation they used a program called Sprite Studio which has a plugin that implements directly into Unreal Engine most bone based 2D Unreal Engine games use spine so it's nice to know that there is another viable option available and I might look into this for future tutorials Subway midnight is a narrative driven psychological horror game that uses 2D Sprite characters in a 3D world and has a very unique art style the game has been a commercial success at an estimated net revenue of over $100,000 on Steam alone but has also been released on Nintendo switch the game is rather popular among YouTubers and I actually discovered it while watching an episode of nitro red when I saw the Unreal Engine logo on the startup screen I jumped out of my chair and started taking notes I couldn't find much info about the development process so I directly reached out to the Creator Bobby Darkstar was happy to tell me about the reasoning for picking Unreal Engine for this project and also their workflow with Sprites they actually didn't use paper 2D and if you don't know what paper 2D is it's the built-in framework and anal engine that makes working with Sprites easier instead they came up with their own method of using Sprites through materials and attaching them to quads which in essence is actually quite similar to what paper 2D does and it proves that you don't have to necessarily go by the book on making games as long as you find a method that works for you they were able to create the entire game with blueprint visual scripting alone and that was their main reason for picking Unreal Engine the next couple of games I want to show you are awesome Indie titles of various genres made by small teams and just to remind you after that we'll get to our prime example of what a high selling unreal 2D game with a big team and high budget behind it can look like gastic is a simple Arena brawler with a 16-bit art style and four-player couch C that received an epic Mega Grant it's very reminiscent of games like Samurai gun and TowerFall but in this game you pick up weapons that are spread out across the map to get into gunfights gastic is the kind of game you wouldn't expect to be made with unreal since there's absolutely nothing that would indicate it well except for the startup screen showing the logo the game has fast load times performs well and is very responsive it actually ran it up to 700 FPS on Steam deck if I remove the frame cap the way I found out about gastic was through their block where they share a lot of great information about how they created it imp of the sun is a fast-paced 2d action platformer inspired by Peruvian culturists that released on Steam switch PlayStation and Xbox in 2022 the game was featured in an Unreal Engine developer interview where they revealed their reasoning for making a 2d platform like this in Unreal Engine for most people on the team this was their first project and making a 2d game comes with less challenges however they plan to make 3D games with unreal in the future and wanted to carry over the experience gained by this project like most other deaf interviews they also praed blueprint Vision scripting and how that allowed the planners and artists to make changes in engine without having to run everything by the engineers the taint too good for school is a 2d sides scrolling beatm up I already talked about in my last video the reason I bring it up again is that I'm personally really looking forward to playing it and there has been a new trailer highlighting the combat and mini games according to the developer the game is near in completion and will release on Steam Early Access a few months from now replic survivors is a vampire survivors like that recently released into steam Early Access what sets it apart from other games of the genre is the pixel art anime look and the Sci-Fi theme the leite developer actually turned out to be a friend of my War colleague so I just ran a couple of questions by them the reason their small team decided to use Unreal Engine 5 over a more obvious choice like Unity is that they are also game developers during their day jobs and have a lot of experience working with unreal this allowed them to finish the game much faster rather than spending time learning a new engine just for the 2D features they did mentioned though that they struggled with unreal engines lackluster 2D support at first but overcame those issues after implementing paper paper ZD for those of you that don't know paper ZD is a free plugin that adds support for animation graphs and animation notifies and makes working with Sprites and flip book animations a lot easier never ending Beyond is a top down Rog light shooter where you use vegetables as weapons and collect animals that give you passive Buffs it's currently still in development but there's a demo available on Steam which I actually found quite addictive and played all the way through I found this game through a thread on Reddit where the developers share their thoughts on making 2D games with unreal the game is being created by a single person and the developer is mainly an artist that doesn't know how to code in C++ or C they started prototyping in unity first because it offered a visual scripting solution called bold however it is not nearly as sophisticated as blueprints with unreal and with bold two being cancelled the future of visual scripting in unity looks very Bleak unreal allowed them to create the entire game with blueprints only without having to write a single line of code and they don't regret switching engines at all for the animation tree system of characters they're using the pixel 2D plugin from the marketplace however nowadays I believe using paper ZD is by far the better option if you're only looking for animation graph support since it's free and less looed wonderling is a 2d puzzle platformer that released on PC and switch in 2020 but the Swedish developer team kept on making adjustments and additions to the game and released a free Deluxe update in 2022 they got featured in a new story on the epic game store where they share a couple of screenshots of their tile map setup talk about paper 2D and also spend some time badmouthing Unity Andrew lies is a dark fantasy Metro Vania with Souls like elements and in my opinion the game that stands out the most it released a critical Acclaim in 2021 and is now available on Steam switch PlayStation and Xbox with an estimated net revenue of over $10 million on Steam alone it's safe to assume it grows around 20 to 25 million USD across all platforms since it sold over 1 million units to date when I made my last video I was completely unaware that Ander lies was made with Unreal Engine until somebody was nice enough to point it out in the comments like a lot of the games I introduced in the last video Ander lies also uses a program called spine to create bone based 2D animations and implements them directly in unre Legend through their SDK Andrew lies is the prime example of why Unreal Engine is absolutely a valid option for making 2D games the game looks amazing it's well received has sold really well has a fairly normal package size of about 1.5 GB for a game of this quality and it actually runs amazingly well even on Steam deck when setting the frame rate to unlock the game ran at around 380 FPS of course the steam deck screen only supports 60 Hearts so you would want to play at a locked 60 FPS however this just goes to show that annually is cleared the performance bar by about 600% I hope through these examples You Now understand that even unre is a bit lacking when it comes to 2D features things like blueprint visual scripting material graphs and the high chance of getting an epic Mega Grand make it a great option for 2D and 2D 3D hybrid games as well the next big unreal 2D 3D hybrid game that everybody is waiting for right now is the Dragon Quest 3 remake which I talked about more in my last video along other Square Enix HD 2D games if you still haven't watched that one and want to know about even more Unreal Engine 2D titles click on the video link on this end screen as always thanks to my awesome patrons [Music]

Channel: Cobra Code

Views: 28,287

Keywords: game development, unreal engine, gamedev, ue4, ue5, game dev, 2d unreal engine, unreal engine 2d, unreal engine 5 2d, paper 2d, unreal engine paper 2d, paperzd, unreal engine paperzd, 2d unreal engine games, 2d games, best 2d games, octopath traveler, hd-2d, square enix hd-2d, 2d, 2d game development, 2d game, 2d 3d hybrid, 2d sprite unreal engine, 2d ue5, triangle strategy, octopath traveler unreal engine, 2d indie games, unreal engine indie games, unreal engine 2d game

Id: eI7Yaps-11Q

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024