As silly as it may sound, I was sold on Unreal Engine 4 when I saw the Tappy Chicken demo. No, it was not because I wanted to make another darn Flappy Bird rip-off, but because I am widely interested in 2D development and have always been fascinated by the mixture of 2D sprites and 3D lighting effects and particles (see a game like Rayman Legends to know what I mean).
When I first got Unreal Engine, I immediately started poking around for 2D things. I tried importing 2D images which game in as textures but when I poked around the plugins, I found my golden gem. A folder called 2D was right there and in it contained a plugin called Paper2D, a tool that managed 2D sprites and what not. I immediately enabled it and relaunched Unreal out of pure excitement. When it relaunched I was jumping up and down then it opened and I thought to myself, how the f*** do I use this thing?!
There is literally zero documentation and tutorials on it and I was wondering if anyone who knows how to use it or has seen documentation on would be kind enough to help the fellow forum members and I on it.
Seems like that plugin is one of the experimental plugins, so there might not be official docs until it’s released.
I guess one option for you is to glance through the code for the plugin if you don’t mind getting into that.
Obviously this shouldn’t be the answer for everyone and docs should be written, but learning to read through plugin code is always helpful for times when a community created plugin is lacking docs.
Apparently if I remember correctly it said somewhere that the Tappy Chicken game was made by a single designer at Epic. It could be worth doing a little digging into the assets and check if you can find who they were, then maybe approaching them for some advice.
It’s a long-shot, but that’s just another avenue worth looking into.
If the Tappy Chicken sample was made with this plugin it’s code should be a very good base to get going and dig into how it works.
I haven’t gotten to look at it yet (just installed my UE4 copy last night) but it’s definitaly on my list as I’m a huge fan of 2D based games myself
Yea I also created a 2d game :), It is some what similar too flappy but different the only reason why so close is because I want to see how it works inside unreal engine. Since I am usually a Unity mobile developer so at this stage I am waiting on ads too work for mobile ads that I can connect with my own ad companys.
Yes, Tappy Chicken is simply made with meshes that I created in 3dsMax. I also included the actual Max file in the project as well, if you want to check it out. It is in…/Samples/SampleGames/TappyChicken/SourceArt/Meshes/TappyChicken_01.max
I set it up so that 1 pixels of art is 8 units in Max/Unreal.
Here is a little tip if you want to work with pixelated 8 bit style graphics in Max, switch the Renderer to Legacy OpenGL, then click Configure Driver, and set the download texture sixe to what res you artwork is, and then check Match Bitmap Size as Closely as Possible. then set the Texel Lookup to Nearest, and the MipMap Lookup to None.
Set you Grid to 8 as well.
This will give you sharp pixels in the viewport, so you can accurately UV and edit you meshes.
Thank you so much! This will really be helpful to us 2D users.
Another question I have though is, will lighting effects still work on these 2D meshes? It may seem like a really stupid question but I want to go for something like Rayman Legends lighting so yeah…
I just set all these material to be unlit, but you could just have them be lit by lights if you want, no problem, these are just normal meshes.
You can also do some interesting stuff with Material Parameter Collections. I used this for changing the time of day, adding fog, fading to black, screen flash, and changing the sky colors. I also used vertex color to mask between the 2 sky colors, and add some of the fog color to the background hills.
I have a Blog post about the coolness of Material Parameter Collections that will go up soon, just keep an eye out on the main page of unrealengine.com
Would love to see a tutorial on this :(, I have been trying too replicate it for a while now and just not getting far. I already have my meshes that are made in photoshop.
So basically you have created a whole bunch of meshs with just planes then layed them all on top of each other while in max. Once imported into UE4 you then worked with the playspawn and materials. Then moved too blueprints and With all that how long did it take to make the basic game mechanics?
You can look at the 3dsMax file to see how I set the stuff up in there. It’s in Samples/SampleGames/TappyChicken/SourceArt/Meshes/TappyChicken_01.max
The source textures are 512, and I was making them 8 to 1 scale, so I mapped them onto a 4096 unit quad in 3dsMax, then cut that quad up as needed to extract my layers, fence, plants, hills, clouds etc. Then, I positioned those layers how I wanted them to be arranged in the world in Max. Then I just brought those meshes textures into UE4, and added them to my Blueprint as Static Mesh Components. When bringing a mesh into UE4 from Max, it will use 0,0,0 as the pivot location for them mesh, so you can just set all the locations to 0 for the StaticMesh Components that are your layers, and they will be in the same location you had them in 3ds Max. If your material is transparent you can adjust the Translucency Sort Priority for each Static Mesh Component, just look in the Details panel, you can search for it by just typing sort. Higher numbers are rendered last, and you can use negative numbers if you want.
As for how long it took me to get the basic game up and running, once I had the meshes made, doing a first pass of the basic game mechanic took a few hours. The I spent a few days adding polish, Title Screen, Go Screen, Game Over Screen, Saving and loading, setting stuff up to reset each play through, time of day changes, etc. I also spent some time cleaning up the blueprint and making comments for you guys to read.
I think its awesome that the developers are commenting on these threads! Thanks for the insight Shane.
I’m very much interested in learning how to use Blueprint, but having troubles as I do not have any programming experience. I can easily think of the things I’d like to do, but iterating them is tough
Can’t wait for more tutorials so I can really start learning more.
Start ripping it apart I have been doing that on all of their examples and is learning a lot, its the same as coding you rip it apart and break it then place it together again!
Thanks Shane for that great info I had to ask so I was not second guessing myself
As a programmer, this sounds painful. I imagine I could write a converter that generates meshes from a texture atlas at runtime, unless Paper2D does that already.
I was wondering has anyone got their head around “Tappy Chicken”? Understanding its workflow and such on once its imported how would you start building your blueprints. Still rapping my head around a few things.
I wish! I have been staring at most of the things in tappy chicken. but I couldn’t figure out bits and pieces of it would be great if someone who figured it out did a deconstruction nand reassemble it from scratch as a video tutorial. I didn’t get the bits about the nodes like screen flash color and screen fade amount work . and how can I change them .
parts of it I can understand but parts I cant. It is great that devs are replying here. thanks for the reply’s shane caudle :-). and everyone.
would be great if someone did a 2d game tutorial with blue prints and unreal engine 4.
I’ve got it ripped apart fairly well. (Thanks for building it) Something strange I’ve notice as I’ve started bringing in my own meshes, they will layer one way in the editor and completely different in the game mode. Some times one mesh will clearly be in front of another, and it show ups under it in game mode. I’m wondering if there is some ordering property like with sprites that I’m missing or something of that sort.
Never mind, I just answer my own question for anyone else looking. You just need to twirl down the arrow on the rendering tab under details. It had more options, Translucency Sort Priority did the trick.
