Original subtitles

In this lesson, we're going to create our project and go through the most essential settings you need

for 2D games.

Like we talked about in the course orientation, we're going to use Unreal Engine 5.3.

You can see that I have 5.3.2 here, but any version of 5.3 is fine.

Just click on launch to open up the project browser.

Of course you want to create a game.

So click on the games tab here.

And we now have to pick the correct template on my PC.

You can see three additional templates you don't see on your end.

Two of these are only available for patrons, but this 2D side scroller one is available for everybody

for free on GitHub, and you can check it out from the link in the resources.

This can help you set up 2D games much faster.

However, in this course I of course want to show you how we can make a game from scratch.

So we're going to select the blank template and start from here on the right side.

We don't have to change any of these settings.

We want to make a blueprint project.

Target platform is desktop.

We don't need starter content and we also don't need ray tracing.

We then just have to give the project a name, and I'm just going to call it Mega Action Platformer

and click on create.

Once it's done loading, you should see this big open world map.

And of course, this is not what we're going to use.

So let's first go to File New Level and select the basic level and click on create.

And this is the level I always like to use when setting up the characters and prototyping.

But later on, of course, we're also going to use Tilemaps and make a 2D level as well.

First, we need to save the map to make sure that it doesn't just disappear.

So we can go to File Save current level as and in here in content, right click create a new folder

called maps.

Click enter.

Go into the maps folder.

And now we can set the name for the map.

And it's customary to call it map.

All in caps underscore.

And I'm going to call it debug.

And click on save.

Now we also want to set this as the default map, because if we close down Unreal Engine now and open

it up again, it doesn't know which map to load, so we have to set it up.

For this we can go to Edit Project Settings.

Go to maps and modes here, and under default maps for the editor startup map, we can click here and

select our map debug which we created and the same for the game default map.

Again, select the map debug.

The difference here is that the editor startup map is the first map that Unreal Engine shows you if

you open it up, and the game default map is actually the map that is first loaded.

If you package the game and a player opens up your game.

And if you want to set this for both.

So we can now exit out of this.

And even if we close the Unreal Engine and open it up again, it's first going to open up this map.

Let's just have a quick look at what this map gives us.

Uh, first of all, well, we have the ground here, and this is what our character is going to be able

to walk around on.

Uh, we have directional light, which is basically emulating the sun.

We have exponential height, fog, the sky, atmosphere and skylight.

And these just all contribute to what the map is going to look like.

You can actually click on this eye icon and you can see toggle certain things off and on and see what

they do.

And this is a very easy way to understand what each element does.

And yeah, we're first going to build out our game as a 2D 3D hybrid, which means we are using 2D characters

that use sprites, but the background is going to be 3D, as you can see here.

And later on we're also going to make a 2D only map and change the settings accordingly.

One quick thing I always like to do when working with this map, because the ground looks kind of boring,

and this is also going to teach you about materials a little bit.

I like to just go to content, create a new folder, call it materials.

And I want to give the floor a custom material.

So if we select the floor here, you can scroll down and you're going to see materials element zero.

And you have this myproc grid.

And this determines what the floor is going to look like.

You can just click on the folder icon here.

And it's going to show you where this is located in the folder.

And you can see on the left side.

Now like we have all of these folders.

These are not our project folders, but actually the folders that come with this version of Unreal Engine.

So we actually don't want to change the material here.

Because if you change the material here, it's going to change it in all of your other games as well.

So we actually just want to create a copy of it.

So this mi underscore Pro grid.

And be very careful with this.

We can drag it into the materials folder.

But we do not want to move it here.

We actually want to copy it here to create a copy of it.

And this succeeded.

We can go back to the materials folder and collapse the engine folder.

And now we have our own copy of the Prakrit, which only exists in this project.

So we can now change this without affecting any of the other projects.

And we can just double click it, open it up.

And here you can see the checker color number one.

Number two.

And we can change all of these to our liking.

So what I like to do for Twitter clips and just sharing with your friends to make the game look cooler

is to not just use the gray, but give it some orange and some nice black colors so we can go to the

checker color one.

And we can just select a nice orange.

And also make it brighter.

Like this and a little bit more saturated.

But yeah, you can also use a different color if you like to and click on okay.

And for the checkered color number two I just want to go pretty dark, not completely black but just

a very dark.

Go a little bit into the blues.

Make it look a little bit more interesting.

And then click on okay.

Then on the left we can click on save.

Close this window.

And nothing has changed yet because we still have to apply this material.

And you can just drag it onto the floor and it's going to apply it.

And I think this by itself already makes it look a little bit more interesting.

And this was also just a small exercise of how we can copy a material from the engine folder and make

a local copy for ourselves.

This is something we're also going to use for the paper 2D materials later on.

When making 2D and 2D 3D hybrid games with Unreal Engine, there are certain project settings we need

to take care of right away.

So let's do that.

The first thing we want to do is go to Edit Project Settings and look for anti-aliasing.

In short, anti-aliasing is a process that removes jagged lines and makes objects look smoother.

On the left side you can see no anti-aliasing, and on the right side you see it with anti-aliasing.

And if I drag around here, you can see how the jagged lines or stair steps here disappear.

And generally this is a good thing.

However, with pixel art this can cause many issues and graphical artifacts.

And here in the default settings and the aliasing method, you can see that by default this is set to

TSR.

And this works great for 3D games, however not with pixel art.

So we can click here and see all of the available options.

If you make a 2D only game, we could select none because we don't benefit from anti-aliasing.

However, if we make a 2D 3D hybrid, we want the backgrounds and 3D objects to use anti-aliasing,

and the method that is best for this is fxaa.

This makes your backgrounds look better, but actually doesn't have negative effects on your pixel art.

So for 2d 3D hybrids, I always use this.

But even for 2D only games, this doesn't really cause any issues.

But again, for 2D only game you could switch to none.

The next one you want to take care of is motion blur.

Search it up and by default this is set to true.

Again, this is a very stylish effect that might work well with 3D games, but even with 3D games,

there are some people that don't like this.

And for 2D games using pixel art, this is actually really bad and causes glitches and artifacts.

So we always want to turn this off for 2D games and 2D 3D hybrid games as well.

Next up is pixels per unit.

And this is a setting in the paper to the importer, and the value we set here will be applied to any

sprite we create.

After setting this up, the default pixels per unreal unit is 1.0.

But first we also need to understand what is an Unreal Engine unit.

Well, one Unreal Engine unit is one centimetre.

Or 0.032ft.

This means that if we have a 32 pixel tall character like this with the setting of one pixel per unit,

the character will only be 32cm tall, which is very small for a human.

However, if we change the pixel per unit setting to 0.25, this sprite will basically be four times

as big.

And that means this character would be 128cm, or 4.2ft tall.

This is about the height of a child, but since this character is drawn in a chibi style, this is in

a reasonable range.

Why is this important?

Because the character movement component expects our character to be of a reasonable height.

Otherwise, you'll run into issues where you'll instantly snap down ledges.

Or you can just walk up stairs that are way too high.

So this is always something you want to keep in mind with your pixel per unit setting.

And from my experience, 0.25 is usually the go to value, and you can then experiment a little bit

and make some changes if you need to.

But for this project, 0.25 turned out to be the right value.

So let's update this from 1 to 0.25.

And as the last step for this video, we want to install the free Paper XRD plugin.

I talked about why we use Paper XRD and how amazing it is in the course orientation.

So in case you skipped that lesson, please make sure to check it out.

Installing and setting it up is very simple.

You want to open up the Epic Games launcher and go to Unreal Engine and Marketplace.

Here under Search Products.

You just want to type in paper, CD, paper, CD and make sure there's no space and then search for

it.

And it should be the first thing that shows up by Critical Failure Studio.

And since I already have it installed, for me it just says install to engine.

But for you it should say something like free or claim.

So please click on that, log in to your account and make sure that this free plugin is attached to

your account.

After that, you can simply click on Install to Engine and you can then select Unreal Engine 5.3.

I already have it installed, so for me it doesn't show up here.

But yeah, just make sure to select Unreal Engine 5.3 after it's done installing.

If you click on install plugins under Unreal Engine 5.3, you should then be able to see papers here.

After that, you might need to restart the Unreal Engine project.

And once you open it up again here we want to go to Edit plugins and look for paper CD again with no

space in between.

And it should then show up here.

And we then want to activate this plugin.

So just click here to toggle it on.

And you then have to restart the Unreal Engine editor again.

But you can just click on restart.

Now here we can then easily confirm that paper ID is active by either just going back to plugins and

looking for paper CD again and just seeing that it is checked now.

But also if we're in the map and open up the content drawer, we can just right click anywhere.

And we should then have the paper context menu available.

And here we can create animation sequences, animation source and animation blueprint.

So this is proof that Paper XRD is correctly installed and initialized.

And this is all the groundwork we have to do to create a 2D or 2D 3D hybrid game.

In the next lesson, we're going to start to prepare the character sprites.