The State of 2D Game Development with Unreal Engine 5

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In this video we'll explore the current state of 2D Game Development with Unreal Engine 5. Paper 2D and PaperZD have been around for a long time, but recently there have been many updates I want to highlight.

Timecodes:
0:00 Intro
0:37 Extravaganza Game Dev Bundle
1:14 Has Pixel Animation Property
2:09 Bone Based 2D Animation
3:29 No More Tone mapping
4:46 Ansimuz joining Unreal
5:14 PaperZD Updates
9:21 Free 2D Template
10:15 Remaining issues

🎵 Music By:
- Krynoze - Pawmises
- Provided by Lofi Records

#cobracode #gamedev #unrealengine #ue5

[CobraCode]

An update on the 'Has Pixel Animation' settings.
Sadly it seems that this did not completely remove ghosting when using flipbooks together with TSR as the Anti Aliasing method.
During another test today I would get ghosting regardless of if this setting is on or off... so it seems FXAA or NONE is still the way to go for now.

[TyX]

Ya, i was one of the people who jumped from Unity to Unreal during the rush, I do not regret it in anyway

[MortMort]

Thanks for the shoutout <3
I watched your video on how to create Unreal Plugins so it wound't have excisted without you!

[zozonias]

Its been great to see more attention to Unreal Engine's 2D capabilities. As someone who has been working on a 2D game in UE5 for a couple of years now, I think its completely doable, as long as you are more open-minded and problem-solving oriented.

[compatriot]

10:02 That's great to hear that Epic has recongized your work. Hoping they'll be more supportive of 2D focused creators in the future

[Mekkablood]

Just made a video about doing this for a boomer shooter within UE5. It's hard to get people to realize how good this engine is for 2d/sprite based games when that's been the stigma for so long. But it actually works great. Awesome video.

[sixiangyang]

UE5 still lacks some easy workflows for 2D games, such as tilemap, like Godot engine with good tilemap editor, 2D skeleton tools like you mentioned in the video and so on. We need people like you to guide them through workflow improvements.

[rogerwinright]

I've been loving your course on 2D Unreal engine on Udemy! I'm glad I could help sponsor you and your work!

[thygrrr]

As a decade-plus long Unity developer, now on Godot, and also having shipped multiple GameMaker games... I absolutely love the look of your game and also your well-informed and interesting showcase of the state of 2D on Unreal! This vid was extremely valuable and enjoyable to me!

[StevenDiLeo]

Great video! 2d has always scared me in unreal, so it’s nice to hear your experiences and tips with it! ❤

[seasonsod]

As someone who has been interested in making 2D games for ages and worked with Paper2D for a couple years now, this video has been amazingly helpful... and I'm not even all the way through it yet! So many problems I've had to make duct tape fixes for (like tonemapping) or problems I've yet to face in my current serious project (animated widgets), now finally having answers.

Seriously, thank you for spreading the word like this. 👌

[zackaccount]

What an awesome time to be exploring 2D in Unreal Engine. Congrats on getting some attention from Epic! I know 2D is a lesser priority for them but it seems like it would be foolish not to further leverage it in Unreal at a time when Unity has made some well known missteps. Another great video, can't wait for the next!

[janrickflores]

As a student who have to make a 2d game for my school project. Cobra code really helped me a lot on knowing how to create 2d games using unreal.

[RockyMulletGamedev]

the tone mapping thing is very interesting !

And yeah would be nice to get Epic more interested in 2D. My auto tiller is a bit clunky but not that wild and would probably take a very short time to an Epic employee to implement something similar directly in the tile map editor, it would benefit everybody and would be much nicer than the one I did on the side with a couple of Editor Utility widgets and custom data assets.

[NiclasAronsson-frpn]

Excellent video. Your beginner video was what finally pushed me to install UE5 and start playing around building games again.

[flufflepimp]

That select anim by ENUM worked Perfect for my Emote choosing. Was perfection

[mattgreen]

I could never figure out a good way to make animated sprite VFX with PaperZD. If the Niagara support makes that possible now then that's a huge improvement!

[creativebeetle]

Thanks for highlighting these updates!
PaperZD definitely has a lot of potential.

Would be great to see some more customisable physics collision shapes for the player character template. Things work a bit strangely with the default capsule collider if you want to use a different collision shape or a combination of shapes for the physics.

[IllyasArt]

2D on UE has been p good the past few years. Just need a few more AAA 2D games, and it'll be even better!

[ITAngel]

Great work as always. Keep it up! I'm looking forward to learning more about UE5.4 - 2D/2.5D game development. I like Unreal's workflow and options; however, it would be great if they had more plug-ins and tools to help with 2D development, such as better tile drawing tools. This is why I've been bouncing between Godot 4 and Unreal Engine 5 lately.