Can You Really Make A 2D Game In Unreal?

do not make 2D games with Unreal Engine that's what I've been seeing when I search this topic on Google but this is not necessarily the case and I found this to be true when my buddy Cobra code helped me realize it's totally possible Cobra code has over two years of experience making 2D and 2.5d games in unreal and has a Channel with over 50,000 Subs subscribe below by the way if you want to stay connected to him the truth is that yes I personally decided to stick with unity but I know the risks and if you're just starting out I suggest at least hearing Cobra code out to the end of the this video to help you determine if unreal could actually be a great option for you in your dream 2D game thanks Thomas and hey everyone I'm super excited to talk to you about 2D game development with Unreal Engine and how I ended up going down that rabbit hole like most of you I also started out learning how to make games through Unity I was happy enough with it when it came to making 2D games but for 3D games primarily being a programmer made it really hard for me to make things look nice with Unreal Engine however everything just looked great by default the visual Fidelity blueprint visual

scripting and the general workflow made me switch from Unity to un about 5 years ago but one day I realized that there are certain types of games that just work better in 2D rather than 3D I didn't want to switch back to Unity after investing so much time into unreal so about two years ago I started to look into the possibility of making 2D games in Unreal Engine at the time there was barely any information available about paper 2D which is unreal's framework for working with 2D Sprites for the most part I only found forign posts of people asking if making 2D games in unreal was even possible just to be told that it can technically be done but it's really bad and they shouldn't bother with it seeing this was very discouraging but I wasn't quite ready to give up especially since I knew there was even an official 2D template built into unreal 4 I somehow stumbled upon an unreal Fest panel by the lead artist of octopath traveler which at the time I wasn't aware has been made using Unreal Engine 4 in case you don't know octopath traveler is a critically acclaimed jrpg that has sold millions of copies is available on multiple platforms and birth the HD 2D style that has been used in many more Square Enix titles after

this the panel went into many technical details about how they use 2D Sprites together with 3D environments to fuse Nostalgia with novelty so this did prove to me that at least 2D 3D hybrid games can be made at full scale with unreal and encouraged me to just give it a try myself I simply opened up Unreal Engine and created a new project with the 2D sidescroller template this allowed me to just look at the working Blueprints and change things little by little instead of having to rely on tutorials to figure out how things work and after a bit of trown error I had a custom 2D Sprite character in a 3D world that properly works with the lighting engine and can also cast and receive Shadows I decided to take things even further and recreate that octopath Traver HD 2D look as best as I could I added depth of field adjusted the lighting added particle effects and so on I was blown away by how easy this was to set up and by how good it actually looked so much so that I decided to take this base and turn it into a sides scrolling beat them up next I wanted to try to not only make 2D 3D hybrids but full on 2D games that also use time maps for the stages unreal does come with a tiap editor that works well

enough and is serviceable however in this area other engines like Unity are far ahead nonetheless I was able to make a couple of simple platformer games with the system without too much trouble and also made fullon tutorials about this on my channel recently I also created a Mega Man style action adventure with wall jumps 2D projectiles 2D enemy Ai and all of the things you typically need in a 2d sidescroller so the conclusion to our question of can we really make 2D games with Unreal Engine is yes not only are we able to make 2D 3D hybrid games like octopath traveler but also full on 2D games that don't use any 3D elements but just because we can doesn't necessarily mean that we should with other engines like unity and gdau available we need to weigh out the pros and cons to decide on what engine we should use and the answer will be different for everyone most people will dismiss Unreal Engine because the 2D tool set is not that great and they believe an engine that can produce photorealistic Graphics like this would be overkill for 2D games but when making a decision like this we need to look at the bigger picture handling 2D Sprites and 2D rendering is only a small portion

of making games and you shouldn't make a decision solely based on that so let me make my case for unreal as a viable option Unity has made very questionable choices recently and it will be hard to trust them again with our time and money with Unreal Engine the licensing agreement is a lot better and you won't have to pay anything until your game reaches a gross revenue of $1 million they also have the Epic Mega grants program which gives financial support to many different projects without any strings attached especially 2D games made with unreal have a really high chance of getting a grant because they show a side of unreal to the world that not many people know about blueprint visual scripting is another argument for Unreal Engine since you can make complete games without having to write a single line of code Unity has experimented with their own visual scripting solution called bold however unreal blueprints are much more advanced and with bold to being cancelled the future of visual scripting in unity is looking Bleak Unreal Engine also has a big emphasis on online multiplayer for many things replication just works right out of the box and it's rather easy to get started when it comes to Raw performance an will definitely lose us out to its Rivals but all we care about

for 2D games is keeping a stable 60 FPS very recently I did some performance tests and was able to run this 2D game I made in unreal at 440 FPS on my laptop and 370 FPS on the steam deck which means I'm easily cleared the necessary performance bar so it doesn't really matter that Unity or gdau might be able to crank out 1,000 FPS or more since the game should run at a capped frame rate by default to prevent unnecessary heat generation and power usage and the players won't notice a difference anyway there are also many more financially successful and critically claimed Unreal Engine 2D games released on Steam and modern consoles than you might think Ander lies is the prime example for this running at over 330 FPS on the steam deck and having sold over 1 million units across all platforms but instead of listening to me I believe you should just try making a 2d game and unreal buy yourself I recently released an updated beginner tutorial on how to get started making 2D games that teaches you all of the basics step by step please check it out from the link in the description or on this end screen and if you want to know more about unreal 2D in general make sure to check out the other video on my

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