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In this lesson, we're going to create our project and go through the most essential settings you need
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for 2D games.
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Like we talked about in the course orientation, we're going to use Unreal Engine 5.3.
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You can see that I have 5.3.2 here, but any version of 5.3 is fine.
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Just click on launch to open up the project browser.
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Of course you want to create a game.
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So click on the games tab here.
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And we now have to pick the correct template on my PC.
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You can see three additional templates you don't see on your end.
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Two of these are only available for patrons, but this 2D side scroller one is available for everybody
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for free on GitHub, and you can check it out from the link in the resources.
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This can help you set up 2D games much faster.
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However, in this course I of course want to show you how we can make a game from scratch.
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So we're going to select the blank template and start from here on the right side.
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We don't have to change any of these settings.
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We want to make a blueprint project.
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Target platform is desktop.
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We don't need starter content and we also don't need ray tracing.
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We then just have to give the project a name, and I'm just going to call it Mega Action Platformer
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and click on create.
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Once it's done loading, you should see this big open world map.
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And of course, this is not what we're going to use.
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So let's first go to File New Level and select the basic level and click on create.
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And this is the level I always like to use when setting up the characters and prototyping.
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But later on, of course, we're also going to use Tilemaps and make a 2D level as well.
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First, we need to save the map to make sure that it doesn't just disappear.
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So we can go to File Save current level as and in here in content, right click create a new folder
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called maps.
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Click enter.
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Go into the maps folder.
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And now we can set the name for the map.
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And it's customary to call it map.
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All in caps underscore.
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And I'm going to call it debug.
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And click on save.
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Now we also want to set this as the default map, because if we close down Unreal Engine now and open
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it up again, it doesn't know which map to load, so we have to set it up.
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For this we can go to Edit Project Settings.
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Go to maps and modes here, and under default maps for the editor startup map, we can click here and
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select our map debug which we created and the same for the game default map.
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Again, select the map debug.
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The difference here is that the editor startup map is the first map that Unreal Engine shows you if
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you open it up, and the game default map is actually the map that is first loaded.
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If you package the game and a player opens up your game.
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And if you want to set this for both.
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So we can now exit out of this.
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And even if we close the Unreal Engine and open it up again, it's first going to open up this map.
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Let's just have a quick look at what this map gives us.
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Uh, first of all, well, we have the ground here, and this is what our character is going to be able
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to walk around on.
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Uh, we have directional light, which is basically emulating the sun.
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We have exponential height, fog, the sky, atmosphere and skylight.
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And these just all contribute to what the map is going to look like.
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You can actually click on this eye icon and you can see toggle certain things off and on and see what
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they do.
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And this is a very easy way to understand what each element does.
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And yeah, we're first going to build out our game as a 2D 3D hybrid, which means we are using 2D characters
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that use sprites, but the background is going to be 3D, as you can see here.
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And later on we're also going to make a 2D only map and change the settings accordingly.
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One quick thing I always like to do when working with this map, because the ground looks kind of boring,
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and this is also going to teach you about materials a little bit.
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I like to just go to content, create a new folder, call it materials.
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And I want to give the floor a custom material.
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So if we select the floor here, you can scroll down and you're going to see materials element zero.
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And you have this myproc grid.
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And this determines what the floor is going to look like.
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You can just click on the folder icon here.
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And it's going to show you where this is located in the folder.
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And you can see on the left side.
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Now like we have all of these folders.
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These are not our project folders, but actually the folders that come with this version of Unreal Engine.
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So we actually don't want to change the material here.
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Because if you change the material here, it's going to change it in all of your other games as well.
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So we actually just want to create a copy of it.
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So this mi underscore Pro grid.
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And be very careful with this.
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We can drag it into the materials folder.
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But we do not want to move it here.
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We actually want to copy it here to create a copy of it.
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And this succeeded.
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We can go back to the materials folder and collapse the engine folder.
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And now we have our own copy of the Prakrit, which only exists in this project.
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So we can now change this without affecting any of the other projects.
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And we can just double click it, open it up.
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And here you can see the checker color number one.
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Number two.
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And we can change all of these to our liking.
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So what I like to do for Twitter clips and just sharing with your friends to make the game look cooler
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is to not just use the gray, but give it some orange and some nice black colors so we can go to the
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checker color one.
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And we can just select a nice orange.
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And also make it brighter.
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Like this and a little bit more saturated.
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But yeah, you can also use a different color if you like to and click on okay.
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And for the checkered color number two I just want to go pretty dark, not completely black but just
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a very dark.
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Go a little bit into the blues.
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Make it look a little bit more interesting.
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And then click on okay.
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Then on the left we can click on save.
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Close this window.
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And nothing has changed yet because we still have to apply this material.
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And you can just drag it onto the floor and it's going to apply it.
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And I think this by itself already makes it look a little bit more interesting.
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And this was also just a small exercise of how we can copy a material from the engine folder and make
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a local copy for ourselves.
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This is something we're also going to use for the paper 2D materials later on.
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When making 2D and 2D 3D hybrid games with Unreal Engine, there are certain project settings we need
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to take care of right away.
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So let's do that.
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The first thing we want to do is go to Edit Project Settings and look for anti-aliasing.
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In short, anti-aliasing is a process that removes jagged lines and makes objects look smoother.
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On the left side you can see no anti-aliasing, and on the right side you see it with anti-aliasing.
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And if I drag around here, you can see how the jagged lines or stair steps here disappear.
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And generally this is a good thing.
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However, with pixel art this can cause many issues and graphical artifacts.
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And here in the default settings and the aliasing method, you can see that by default this is set to
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TSR.
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And this works great for 3D games, however not with pixel art.
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So we can click here and see all of the available options.
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If you make a 2D only game, we could select none because we don't benefit from anti-aliasing.
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However, if we make a 2D 3D hybrid, we want the backgrounds and 3D objects to use anti-aliasing,
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and the method that is best for this is fxaa.
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This makes your backgrounds look better, but actually doesn't have negative effects on your pixel art.
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So for 2d 3D hybrids, I always use this.
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But even for 2D only games, this doesn't really cause any issues.
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But again, for 2D only game you could switch to none.
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The next one you want to take care of is motion blur.
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Search it up and by default this is set to true.
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Again, this is a very stylish effect that might work well with 3D games, but even with 3D games,
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there are some people that don't like this.
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And for 2D games using pixel art, this is actually really bad and causes glitches and artifacts.
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So we always want to turn this off for 2D games and 2D 3D hybrid games as well.
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Next up is pixels per unit.
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And this is a setting in the paper to the importer, and the value we set here will be applied to any
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sprite we create.
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After setting this up, the default pixels per unreal unit is 1.0.
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But first we also need to understand what is an Unreal Engine unit.
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Well, one Unreal Engine unit is one centimetre.
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Or 0.032ft.
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This means that if we have a 32 pixel tall character like this with the setting of one pixel per unit,
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the character will only be 32cm tall, which is very small for a human.
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However, if we change the pixel per unit setting to 0.25, this sprite will basically be four times
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as big.
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And that means this character would be 128cm, or 4.2ft tall.
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This is about the height of a child, but since this character is drawn in a chibi style, this is in
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a reasonable range.
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Why is this important?
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Because the character movement component expects our character to be of a reasonable height.
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Otherwise, you'll run into issues where you'll instantly snap down ledges.
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Or you can just walk up stairs that are way too high.
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So this is always something you want to keep in mind with your pixel per unit setting.
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And from my experience, 0.25 is usually the go to value, and you can then experiment a little bit
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and make some changes if you need to.
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But for this project, 0.25 turned out to be the right value.
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So let's update this from 1 to 0.25.
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And as the last step for this video, we want to install the free Paper XRD plugin.
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I talked about why we use Paper XRD and how amazing it is in the course orientation.
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So in case you skipped that lesson, please make sure to check it out.
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Installing and setting it up is very simple.
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You want to open up the Epic Games launcher and go to Unreal Engine and Marketplace.
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Here under Search Products.
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You just want to type in paper, CD, paper, CD and make sure there's no space and then search for
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it.
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And it should be the first thing that shows up by Critical Failure Studio.
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And since I already have it installed, for me it just says install to engine.
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But for you it should say something like free or claim.
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So please click on that, log in to your account and make sure that this free plugin is attached to
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your account.
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After that, you can simply click on Install to Engine and you can then select Unreal Engine 5.3.
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I already have it installed, so for me it doesn't show up here.
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But yeah, just make sure to select Unreal Engine 5.3 after it's done installing.
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If you click on install plugins under Unreal Engine 5.3, you should then be able to see papers here.
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After that, you might need to restart the Unreal Engine project.
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And once you open it up again here we want to go to Edit plugins and look for paper CD again with no
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space in between.
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And it should then show up here.
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And we then want to activate this plugin.
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So just click here to toggle it on.
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And you then have to restart the Unreal Engine editor again.
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But you can just click on restart.
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Now here we can then easily confirm that paper ID is active by either just going back to plugins and
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looking for paper CD again and just seeing that it is checked now.
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But also if we're in the map and open up the content drawer, we can just right click anywhere.
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And we should then have the paper context menu available.
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And here we can create animation sequences, animation source and animation blueprint.
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So this is proof that Paper XRD is correctly installed and initialized.
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And this is all the groundwork we have to do to create a 2D or 2D 3D hybrid game.
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In the next lesson, we're going to start to prepare the character sprites.
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