Overcoming 2D limitations in Unreal Engine [Paper2D ➡ PaperZD] - Dev Log

Get my 12 hour course on how to make 2D games with Unreal Engine:

Support the channel on Patreon:

When working with Paper 2D in Unreal Engine you will run into limitations along the way. The first one will most likely be the absence of an animation graph and animation notifies for 2D Sprites. In this video I started using the PaperZD Plugin to overcome those limitations for my beat 'em up game.

PaperZD Plugin on the marketplace:

Timecodes:
0:00 Intro
0:37 Setting up PaperZD
1:13 Animation graph for 2D Sprite
1:59 Animation notifies for 2D Sprite
2:47 Overcoming 2D Sprite issues with Follow AI

Used Assets:

#cobracode #gamedev #madewithunreal #indiedev #gamedevelopment

[CobraCode]

At some point in the video I use an anim notify to set EndAttack and I mentioned this might not be a great idea... yeah turned out this was actually a horrible idea since I sometimes got stuck cause the notify wouldn't fire off. I went down a whole rabbit hole about anim notifies and turns out I've been doing this wrong for years and so are most people.
Will talk more about that in the following dev log!

[CarlosVGMEspresso]

Hey! PZD coder here, reporting in.
Excellent tutorial, really appreciate the use of the plugin!
I'll be sure to show this to people whenever I can

[Glzmo]

did not know this plugin even existed OMG getting it now. will save me so much time and energy

[YahyaDanboos]

Nice, the game is slowly coming along 😁

[philzan]

3:50 you can use the dot product between character and AI and decide on a +/- boolean for direction facing for AI instead since it will only ever face left or right.

[TheSokkaYT]

Joel here,
As someone who's developing a hand drawn beat em up rpg, Paper2D is quite cumbersome in the beginning stages. Of course in my case, I'm still using it as I had found my ways around it's limitations (and bugs), but I definitely have been wishing for a solution like this. But me being a C++ fanatic, I handle animation updates and animation state updates all in code. Not a genius at blueprints, but after learning quite a bit of it, this makes me wanna reconsider! Thanks for the video!

[EvilReFlex]

3:00 -> you can set the rotation of the flipbooks from local to world to stop them from rotating.

[Xiaoxiao]

The Dev of Paper ZD recently did a live stream tutorial with epic games which you can watch on the unreal engine youtube page.

[mmmmmmmmmmm]

Loving the art style. I think her run animation is a bit slow, looks like slowmo. Edit: subscribed, looking forward to watching future devlogs

[CanalDojogames]

Im loving how it appears so good. Im curious how you solved the light issue we have on 2d sidescroll BP project already done by ue4 that we can use. Or did you used the 3d sample style?

[Pac-bqsn]

one thing that would be dope if u decide to implement in ur game to show how u did it would be either gear equipping reflecting in game for the character or color changing for let's say the hair or the armour. There isn't any tutorial for that in ue4 so it's totally something not as easy as we think

[HediDev]

You should make a video about "2D tricks" in UE .

[KnivesFrank]

Nice as always, man!
Paper 2D in unreal is... not perfect.. at all... That's the reason I gave up on my 2d game. Maybe I will change my mind after this video

[UTubeK]

for unwanted rotation did you try to constraint rotation of your actor on a plane ?

[kajekage]

If I wanted to make a game similar to Hollow Knight graphics and gameplay wise would this do the job or am I better off trying another engine first? I wanted to try unreal as I eventually wanted to do some VR development and I have a background in c++,

[HediDev]

Your game looks nice, I've actually started a similar project back in 2020, but because of the 2D limitations I moved the Dora Goken Storm project to Godot . (You can find the prototype in my channel if you wanna see it "2.5D game UE4 showcase" . I was 15 years old at the time . )

[bobgratton]

for the rotation thing, i really dont understand how you can achieve to stop the ai to rotate. We are doing a game similar for school project, having a hard time here.

[andrewdyet]

Running into the same issues with rotation that others have had. I've followed the AIController videos you've done for the Spawn points (which are working correctly), and have put together the blueprints how you have them for SetFocalPoint, Update Focus, and the Behavior Tree. The rotation is still not correcting properly, do you have any advice? I believe the problem lies in whatever comes before the Is Valid before set focal point with connecting the correct target to the focal point.

I've really enjoyed your videos though and thank you for all your work!

[platinumgamer]

how did you set the variable for "is moving right"

[TheSpinner]

How you did the character direction rotation?( sorry my english)