Make a 2D Top Down Game in Unreal Engine 5 - Tutorial
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 มิ.ย. 2024
- Get my 12 hour course on how to make 2D games with Unreal Engine:
tinyurl.com/Ultimate2D
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A lot of you have asked and I'm happy to finally show you how you can make a 2D Top Down Game in Unreal Engine 5. In this tutorial we'll use the free PaperZD plugin since it comes with built in support for multi-directional animations!
Top Down character by axul arts:
axulart.itch.io/small-8-direc...
PaperZD Plugin:
www.unrealengine.com/marketpl...
Tile set by axul arts:
axulart.itch.io/axularts-basi...
Enhanced Input system documentation:
docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-...
If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe: / @cobracode
● Twitter: / cobracodedev
● Discord: / discord
Timecodes:
0:00 Intro
0:34 Activating PaperZD
0:54 Preparing Character Sprites
8:45 Setting up the Character Blueprint
11:55 Creating Top Down Animations
14:09 Creating the Animation Blueprint
15:55 Setting up the Enhanced Input
20:30 Adjusting Project Settings
22:30 Setting up the Sprite Direction
24:45 Switching between Idle and Moving
26:25 Adding wall detection
29:45 Making it a 2D/3D Hybrid
🎵 Music By:
mell-ø - thinking about you
Provided by Lofi Records
Watch: • mell-ø - thinking abou...
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Get my 12 hour course on how to make 2D games with Unreal Engine:
tinyurl.com/Ultimate2D
I forgot to clarify at the beginning of the video that I'm using UE 5.1 for this, so I recommend you also use UE 5.1 or newer for this!
Some viewers are having issue with 5.0.x since the enhanced input action system isn't active by default but has to be turned on manually.
If you start on 5.0.x you can just install 5.1 after, locate your project files on your hard drive, right click on the unreal engine project and select 'change Unreal Engine version' to update the project to 5.1 easily.
But even if you want to stay on 5.0.x you can manually activate the enhanced input system.
Once the project is open click on Plugins in the top bar and activate 'Enhanced Input'.
In the project settings go to Input and set the Default Classes to EnhancedPlayerInput and EnhancedInputComponent.
Delete all action and axis mappings of the old input system.
After that just follow everything as it is in the tutorial.
Been trying to figure this out for a minute, thank you! In your favor, I watched the video like ten times trying figure out where I was going wrong lol.
I INSTANTLY BOUGHT THIS COURSE BECAUSE OF THIS AWSOME TUTORIAL VIDEO! Keep em comming
Thank you so much :D@@9livesK9
Just bought the course on Udemy. This is exactly the kind of games I want to make. :) Thank you.
Awesome, thank you :D@@MrNBoaventura
the 2d character running around in 3d world is the best
like when spongebob comes out of the water
@@eubyg4890 weird comparison but very true lol
Paper Mario
@@hawshimagical lol
if you like headaches, yes
I like this combo it makes you feel like you’re playing two types of games at once
Great tutorial, I love the step by step and the patience it must take to go through these videos, very clear and easy to follow!
Thank you :D
Your tutorials help me so much. I am making a paper mario spiritual successor and this is incredibly helpful towards that aim.
Loved this one can't wait for the next part for combat
This is a really good tutorial, your content is always getting better and better, good job!
Thank you so much for always watching my videos and leaving nice comments :D
It's really motivating!
@@CobraCode Im always in the look out for your videos, and any time I see a new one I’m stoked to watch it! I believe that your videos will get more and more people using UE5 for 2D game dev, and paper ZD being free is just too good!
would love to see a tutorial from you on how to make top down combat using this setup! loved your tutorials, so simple and easy to follow!
YES! Been waiting for this!!! Thank you!
great tutorial, I was asking some similar questions in the PZD discord and the guys there were super nice and showed me the way to do some of this stuff. Great community.
what is the paperZD discord called? I am trying to find it, but no luck yet.
Your tutorial is very informative and awesome :) we are lucky to have you.
Hey man, just wanted to say thank you for making these absolute overkill tutorials! I’ve tried many times to get into game development but alway got discouraged. Thanks for the tutorials and for giving me inspiration and knowledge to work on a passion project. Keep up the amazing work!
Thank you for the kind words :D
I hope you'll be able to stick it through and finish that game eventually!
Thank you for filling the whole that Brackeys left behind! I don't make games myself but watching things like this is so fun to watch
Thank you :)
Brackeys was amazing, yeah!
Taught me more about Unity and making games than my school did.
Hole
Keep coming back to your videos to figure stuff out. Would love a top down ai enemy tutorial too! So far, your channel has been my favorite I've found doing tutorials on PaperZD ♥
Thank you so much :)
The best, without question, THE BEST Unreal tutorial I've ever taken. Amazing.
Thank you so much :D
Amazing work !! Keep this up . Love it
Thank you :D
Well.. that's my weekend covered ! Thank you 🙏
This tutorial has everything! Awesome
Thank you, this is awesome, i am planing on making an top down 2d game with a tile system just for learning the engien. And this will come in handy when i will find the time to do that :)
Exactly what I was looking for 😀 Thanks!
Great Video Thank you Very Much!! My First Day on Unreal and this was perfect!
all your tutorials are great. would love a combat one where you show us how to add in attack animations multiple of them and have unique hit boxes for each!
Thank you!
I do have a method of making what you're describing, but I'm not really happy with it yet and want to do more research to find a better way before making a video about it!
@@CobraCode sounds good I look forward to it
I never enjoyed in my life that much, finally I have feeling my childhood dreams coming true, thanks ❤
Thank you so much for making videos like this, I love how detailed your instructions are for a beginner. I want to draw my own sprite just not sure yet what i want to draw.
Thank you :D
I have run into a weird issue when setting the WASD keys using the 2d sprite.
After save and compile
When I press play the up-and-down directions work correctly, but left and right are backwards.
Then I exit play and press play again without doing anything else and when I press the W or S to move the character up and down , the character only moves to the left or right. A little confusing but I’ll keep working on it and checking my code.
Great video. In depth but not bloated and very easy to follow. Looking forward to the combat video if you ever get around to it. 👍
Thank you for making this tutorial!
thank you so much this tutorial is very useful! 🥰 I made it!!!
Thank you good sir! This is a very good tutorial
Very handsome end result
This is awesome my next project I want to make a paper Mario type game not a lot of good 2d tutorials for unreal I'll be coming back to the rest of this video when I'm ready to get started on the next game
I think learning how to make 2D games in Unreal is a great way to learn the core mechanics of the engine itself. because of your tutorials; coding in C++ is more comfortable. But I still have a long way to go.
I love how you start it like we are new here. It helps alot. (this is not a joke)
Haha, thanks for the feedback.
I know a couple of you have watched all videos, but I also always need to keep in mind the people that randomly stumble upon this and are complete beginners.
It's nice to hear that the slow approach isn't annoying for you as an advanced viewer :)
Super excited to learn how to do full pixel tilesets for top down games in unreal 5...
I love working with unreal but it has always been fairly difficult to do 2d pixel games in unreal
Wow this is so cool! Thank you so much))
You just got a new subscriber. I hope you will grow big
Thank you :D
Just bought your Udemy Course. Looks good. I especially loved the NES Track and Field clone. I'm excited to dig in. :D
Thank you :D
Awesome, I also had a lot of fun making that section.
Thank you very much!!
Hey dude, thanks for this video.
I wanted to tell that I'm going to start game development in college soon this year, and I just want to be prepared with programs like Unreal 5 especially when it comes it to simpler 2D games. This will certainly help alot, and I hope I can put it to the test.
Awesome, I hope you'll have a great time at college and learn a lot!
I actually also went to game dev college, so just some word of advice from me:
Don't expect them to teach you all that much. Nobody can really teach you game dev.
All they can do is guide you and prepare an environment for you to grow through group projects and challenges they put up for the students.
Yo! Thanks so much for making this
Thank you so much! This is what I needed
This is awsome. Thank you so much
Man I love your tutorials and I also enrolled in your course form Udemy, I'm invested in making my own top down RPG and it would be amazing if you had that tutorial on Top down action rpg you mentioned by the end of the video. 31:50. Thanks!
Awesome thank you once again
You Deserve a huge Like Dude
Thank you :D
But I missed something, in PaperZD Animation you only did walking animation.
How should I connect the nodes to make an IF-ELSE statement to say: if player press SHIFT --> running animation, else if --> Walking, else --> Idle@@CobraCode
love your ue2d tutor
Tbh, you did an amazing job. It is pretty much how I want my game to be towards the future. Kinda wish I would of tried RE5 before unity but no one had any info or tutorials on how to make a game similar to pokemon for RE so I just ended up stuck with unity which don't get me wrong is pretty fun and interesting to learn. But the learning curve of movements and player controllers is so different between both. I feel like RE5 is easier to use than unity from watching this video. Then again my brain has been fried with learning C++ xD
Thank you!
Yeah coding in C# in Unity is definitely a lot easier than doing C++ in UE5.
However the visual coding in UE is so much more advanced than anything else out there.
I wouldn't really worry that much about C++ at first, in the end you'll always mix C++ with Blueprints and you can easily create your own nodes with C++ and replace stuff later on.
This is my first ever time trying out Unreal Engine 5, and I'm really glad to follow your guide in this video. Only problem I've encountered is that I have deleted the 'My Event' Tab for my blueprint page. Unfortunately I do not know how to re-open that tab. Wish me luck, so far this has been a blast.
Awesome, I'm glad you're enjoying Unreal Engine :D
On the top bar there should be a tab called 'Window'.
You should be able to activate windows you closed from there.
This is a great tutorial! I really appreciate how you've described everything, but I do have a question: If I'm spawning a bullet or projectile, how do I set the velocity of the bullet to match the direction that the player is facing? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Can't get my pawn to move at all at 21:30
Very good tutorial, i hope they gonna be with game ps1 horror game like puppet combo.
The spacing Y is actually 7. if you use 7 instead of 6 you don't have to move any sprites individually
I tried it, it works good for the walking animations but for the idle ones it cuts off the top row of pixels, I fixed it by going to the source text on a sprite and moving it up, you don’t have to go to each sprite separately you can just click on them.
Cell Width: 16, Cell Height: 24, Margin Y: 192
Tutorial is easy to follow and understand, thanks! Could you make a tutorial that explains how to swap between walking and sprinting for 2D sprites? Can't find anything on it online.
Thank you!
I believe in this video we cover how you can change the speed of an animation, but you could slightly modify that to play a different animation for running.
th-cam.com/video/ogIyMrX_uws/w-d-xo.html
Your videos are awesome
Thank you so much!
this is a great tutorial
Thank you :)
Good video but was hard to follow the node section at the end as didn’t explain what linked to where at times so had to pause a lot 😆 but I got it done in the end thanks 😊
I want more games like that, 2D characters with 3D enviroment
THANK YOU
Muito obrigado pela aula amigo!
Thank you for the video, it helped a lot.
But there is a question, please tell me how to adjust the rotation of the animation for the 16 directed character following the mouse (like top down shooter)
Love this whole tutorial, really inspired me to go for it~
I have a couple of questions though you might have an solution for:
I struggle with doing it first person with hands only visible and look around with free cam.
Since the world direction is set for X and Y is there a way to fix it?
And the character is flat from other angles how would I give some width so it looks like a well proportioned character from all angles?
Thank you so much!
Yeah things being locked to world direction in this tutorial is something I also am not that happy with, but I couldn't figure out a better way of doing it in time for the video.
I've experimented a bit more recently and got things working for a side scroller in a way that it's independent from world direction, so I believe it should also be doable for the top down thing.
Instead of the fixed world direction on the Add Movement Input node you'll want to use Get Actor Forward Vector and Get Actor Right Vector.
But you'll probably have to change the way PaperZD switches between the animation direction.
About the character thickness. That's actually something I'm also interested in but haven't gotten around to trying out yet.
I believe you should probably be able to create an effect like that through material nodes though, since you can basically create your own shaders and can change the way vertices are displayed in there. I'm also not that great with material nodes yet, so something that needs looking into.
really useful tutor
I love this
Awesome~!
I would love a game like this
Hi, I'm finding so much joy and inspiration from this video!! I'm totally new at developing and I'm wondering what are the minimum specs of a computer to easily run Unreal Engine 5.1+ and make top down 2D games like this?
Thanks for the thorough tutorial and inspiration. You've got a new follower!
Thank you :D
Sadly specs aren't something I'm too familiar with since I have a pretty beefy setup and never really struggled with running UE.
This article I found might be helpful though:
www.flaneer.com/blog/best-computer-to-run-unreal-engine-5
Thank you so much for the video!! It helped a lot with setting up a 2d character in unreal, your explanations were super easy to follow :)
one thing I'm wondering tho is what are some ways to prevent the directional inputs getting messed up when the character rotation changes like you mentioned in 21:35? I've been tinkering with having the camera move based on mouse movement in a 3d environment and it causes the directional inputs of the 2d character to get constantly messed up and I'm not sure how to fix it lol
Great tutorial! love all 2d series that you've made!! but I have a one question, in 2d/3d hybrid how you setup "directionality" for the enemy actors? character takes it from the input, but what about AI?
Hey, you'd have to calculate the directionality value from the actor forward direction in that case or from the velocity.
Perfect Tuto!!! Im trying to mix this 8 direction char with the jumping one, but when it jumps, it faces wrong direction :(
My Sprite required different grid settings
Cell Width - 15
Cell Height - 17
Margin Y - 221
Spacing X - 1
Spacing Y -7
Also seems to avoid the leg cut off issue - Guessing the asset was updated
you are a magician! ty was fiddeling for ages trying to line it up
I enjoyed this video,
And I already bought a course on Udemy.
Awesome, thanks!
Great video! I was wondering what I would have to do if I wanted to keep the sprite animations to be either left or right, but rather use other inputs to swap perspectives of the sprite and camera together, by 45° at a time?
Thank you!
It really all depends on what you pass as a value for the 'Directionality'.
You could build your own formula that maybe calculates the angle at which you are looking at your character and create an effect similar to doom for your sprites.
But there are countless possibilities.
FOR the ones in 5.3.2 INPUT CONSUMPTION under IA_Move is now 2 check boxes both should be on took me some time to figure this one out lol!
I like this tutorial, it's very concise and easy to understand! I am now trying to get my sprite to stop at the cube but instead it's moving through the cube. Any ideas?
thank you :)
The most likely scenario is that there's something wrong with your collision settings
Fantastic tutorial! How would you implement a multi directional attack? Especially when doing combos. I'm using a jump node so it gets the direction but there doesn't seem to be a great way to go back to idle after it ends based on the duration of the animation. In a regular ABP you can just check a button to transition when anim ends. I feel like this should be on a Play Montage but I don't think there's a way for it to consider the direction without a bunch of math to figure out which direction I'm facing.
Hello,
Great video!
I implemented jumping animations using your past tutorials on PaperZD, and jumping works for the most part. My movement is the same as this video and I used the same set directionality node for the jumping/falling animations, but I only have one problem. When the character is idle facing left, up, or down and jumping is activated the only animation that displays is the jumping right animation and not the respective directional jumping animation. I only have 4 directions for my sprites and when moving and jumping everything works correctly as it should. I am just wondering how I would begin to fix this or if there is a way to reference the last animation in use and force the character to jump in the same direction? Or even if it's possible to create a node that if the character is facing left, right, up, or down while idle/standing still they jump in that same direction. I plan to also add combat for the 4 directions too and will likely have the same issue if standing still/idle.
Thank you.
Great video bro, I'm thinking of venturing into HD-2D as well because I like both pixel art and 3D. I was wondering if it is possible to do an HD-2D shootemup in Unreal Engine 4?
Thank you!
Yeah you should definitely be able to do that.
I'm not quite sure though if that's a genre that will necessarily benefit much from an HD-2D treatment.
very cool tutorial, what pc or laptop graphics would you recommend
How did you add that comment box in the event viewer when adding controls at 19:38? Your videos are incredible.
Thank you!
You just have to press 'c'
Hey, @CobraCode, thank you for the tutorial! Have you considered packaging the end result of this tutorial and providing a downloadable link?
Hey, I think there's probably not gonna be enough people that are gonna get value from that to justify the effort.
I did start to provide project files for a bunch of tutorials on Patreon recently though.
would love to see how it works in combat. bravo~
Currently working on a combat section for a project like this for a udemy course!
I think I'll eventually also bring something similar to TH-cam
so cool
Great tutorial. Can I ask you for advice?
How do you manage the various heights with the tile map in a topdown?
I haven't really played around that much with tile maps since I personally prefer the way of using a 3D map with the 2D character.
AFAIK the only thing you have available for that is that you can set the distance between different layers on the tile map and their collision thickness, so I imagine that's something you could use for that.
@@CobraCode i'm trying, there seems to be a big hole in eu5 on this one. Unfortunately it seems that the height of the collisions (z axis) is not editable in any way. I always have the problem that the 2d char overrides my collisions :'(
Very happy to finally be able to release this long awaited video!
Support the channel on Patreon:
www.patreon.com/CobraCode
Cell Width: 16, Cell Height: 24, Margin Y: 192
This doesn't need any modification.
The artist on the character sheet says the sprite dimensions are 16x17 but to treat them as 16x24
Thank you for your video, it’s very good
I would like to ask if there is a way to trigger a 2D game interface in a 3D project?
Thank you.
Yeah UI Widgets work the same way with 2D and 3D games.
@@CobraCode Thank you very much. I understand！🙂.
Hey I was wondering if I could get help with this, I started following this tutorial up to about the 21:25 and did all of the stuff according to how you did it, but when it actually came to moving the character, it wouldn't budge and I don't know why. Please help me, someone!!! 😢😭😭
same problem for me here
same
Hey, could it be that you are on UE 5.0.3?
I just updated the pinned comment with instructions on how you could fix this.
Sorry it took me so long to answer, but needed some more information to know what's going on and had to wait for a few more comments.
@@auracle7894 Hey, could it be that you are on UE 5.0.3?
I just updated the pinned comment with instructions on how you could fix this.
Sorry it took me so long to answer, but needed some more information to know what's going on and had to wait for a few more comments.
Not bad, even with common pitfall demos.
very straight forward. subscribe
Thank you :)
Great video!
Coming from unity, do you happen to know if pixel size consitency is not an issue when rotating/zooming/moving the camera.
As this is one major concern working with unity, even though there are some tricks on handling this, it was never fully satisfying.
I think if you're looking for pixel perfection you will probably run into a few issues here as well, if not moreso than unity.
But given that Unreal Engine is very expandable you could probably figure out a solution if you put enough time into it.
Codebra 🐍
watching the first portion of this tutorial, i just made a solid grid by measuring the players pixel height and width then built a grid with those pixels in mind and re-saved. It only took like 2-3 minutes to do. I appreciate the tutorial, but it would be a lot easier in photoshop, asceprite, pyxeledit, etc.
Yeah if you're familiar with an image editing software that's definitely the way to go!
However some users may not have any experience with that which is why I explained how to do it in engine.
Sadly the sprites I used in this tutorial are under a license which doesn't allow me to redistribute them, otherwise I'd have fixed up the layout myself and given them out that way.
@@CobraCode good tutorial either way, thanks for sharing as usual
Huh, what a neat coincidence. I was just thinking of making a top down... 3d game, let's be honest, this is 3d. i was going to use gzdoom to give it some character unique style and style but... yeah i don't think that's ideal. it's going to be a lot of work to do what i had in mind in that game. I'm going to give this a shot first.
Damn, exactly what I needed! My project is not top down, rather sidescroller with 2.5D graphics, but I wondered how I would go about the different animations for my character when aiming. Since the player can aim 360 degrees, I was completely lost for how to set up the sprites and the animation - does this workflow work with sidescroller as well?
Hey, yeah this system is quite flexible and also works for doom style boomer shooters, so I believe you should also be able to solve your problem with this.
It all depends on what information you put into 'set directionality'. In your case it would probably be the angle you're aiming at.
@@CobraCode awesome! Do I ask one more thing though? Would you create sprites for all possible aiming direction that then unreal flips through in regards to the angle the player aims or would you rather restrict it like old metroid games with only 45 degrees? Just out of curiosity :)
@@R-SXX This really depends on what kind of game you wanna make and how much shooting accuracy is necessary to fight the enemies you plan on making.
With Paper ZD the max amount of angles you can have is 16 I think so you'll still be limited to 22.5 Degree jumps.
If you need actual 360 movement you might need to split the lower body and upper body of your sprite and actually just rotate it to where you're aiming while also changing the animation flipbook to possibly be able to aim more accurately within those 22.5 degrees.
I personally would just go for the 45 or 22.5 degree jumps and that is probably enough!
@@CobraCode uh, the splitting gave me a nice idea, thank you so much for the Input and the Video!
Awesome vid. Thank you for sharing this knowledge.
I have a question (sorry if it's been asked before) :
How would you go about controlling the way the character is facing after coming off perfect up or down movement? By default it reverts to facing right.
Is there a way to make it so it remembers the way you were facing before moving up or down? So if you were facing left before moving, idle will revert to facing left when you're done.
Edit :
Solved it by myself.
Anybody reading this still struggling with it, the solution I found is to set a check (with a Branch or something else) that checks on both the X and Y values out of the SET of the directional Vector 2D variable (after the initial Add Movement Input), and SET a new boolean variable called 'IsFacingRight' or something that gets ticked on or off depending on the result, that you can call upon later when the character stops moving. After IA_Move input is completed, use a Branch to check on the IsFacingRight variable. Depending on whether the IsFacingRight variable is true or false, SET the directional variable's X axis to either be 1.0 if true, or -1.0 if false.
That way the character will always face the last direction they were going towards when they come off the moving up or down animation.
Hopefully that helps.
Thank you so much great tutorial. how to use point right click with mouse and character move to point
You can look at the 'top down template' that comes with unreal engine 5 as a reference, I think it has something like that built in
Ok, i am so in to this now :D Will try to make that top down, 2d game with sprites as you showed here, but i want it to be in squares and not the smooth mowing as you are showing. Something like Tibia if you know that game.
Do you think it will be hard to translate from your tutorial to a grid based system?
I haven't really worked much with grid based systems in Unreal Engine yet, but I think most things regarding the tile map and character animations should translate.
You probably won't need a character movement component though and just make a custom system where your inputs will teleport the character to the next space in the grid instead!
@@CobraCode awesome, though I would like the character to walk between the tiles but only able to stop in a tile and move there if there is space for it.
Super helpful,Im currently trying to make my first game using this template!
I want to ask though, Ive connected a spotlight to my character to act as a flashlight but it only faces one direction, I want it so wherever my character's walking towards the beam of light would face that direction but I can't seem to find any solution in any yt tutorial or forum, any suggestions I can try
Awesome tutorial. as usual.
One question - how change sprite if camera change direction? Like in Dont Starve
Thanks!
It's a bit too complex to explain in a comment, but you'd still use the same setup as this, however your conditions for the 'directionality' in the paperzd animation blueprint would change.
Instead of using velocity or the last player input you'd have to do some calculations depending on what the camera angle is in relation to the character.
@@CobraCode yeah, I wrote the logic for changing the sprite from the camera position, but unfortunately, it does not work out to specify the last vector of movement as a reference point. This is what I did
th-cam.com/video/btysErsxo2E/w-d-xo.html
...Do you have any ideas how to implement a sprite change for 2d objects from camera rotation? For example, bushes or non-player characters?
@@wolfdezziignacg2592 The easiest way would be to do that in the material. I forgot the specifics but I think there is just a setting you need to change and everything with that material will always face the camera
Maybe this is because I'm using the legacy input axis system, but the directionality resets to 0,0 when the character is not moving, making it always face left when idle. Do you know how to fix this?
Amazing Tutorial! I wanted to ask, is there a way I could include a jump animation? If so, how could I go about it?
Thank you :)
Yeah you definitely can.
I have a video of a side scroller with PaperZD which you can look at for reference. Here we have a rising jump, falling jump and transitional animation.
th-cam.com/video/ogIyMrX_uws/w-d-xo.html
@@CobraCode Oh !! Thanks soo much!