I’ve recently moved from Unity to Unreal due to the risks that are posed from the continued, long-term use of the engine following the runtime fee change. Sure, the risks are imposed after a certain level of success, but attempting to grow on with this engine would result in higher chances of exceeding the threshold. (Plus it’s good for my college studies and such).
Question:
I decided to make a top-down rouge-like dungeon crawler that relies on random generation to achieve this, except I have no idea where to start due to the nature of the engine being primarily for 3D development.
I have attempted to do research and can find almost nothing, with my search results for 2D still presenting 3D generator tutorials and showcases. If it is anything to be mindeful of, while on Unity I payed for a generation pack called “Edgar” that was extremely good, so if there is anything like that in any capacity, I’d love to have a look.
However, I’m not looking for anything special, even if it’s just with simple square rooms. The only ask is that dungeons can be generated from prebuilt/ blueprints of rooms in an array of a selection.
Thanks:
Any help is again appreciated, though I - once again - understand that the engine isn’t typically made for this kind of thing.
As for top-down, 2d/3d, you can lock the camera angle to whatever you want and just ‘make it’ 2d by virtual of working off a plane relative to the camera. 2.5d sidescrollers work this way.
I’ve gathered some example images for the situation, but since I’m a new user to the forum, can only post one embedded item at a time, so if any more clarification is required just let me know.
However, I believe this “Getting Started” walkthrough video about the “Edgar” dungeon generation pack can summarise how it works well enough. Sorry I can’t provide all of the personal examples that I have made.
I’ll do some experimenting in the meantime, I also found some useful tutorials for 2D top-down games made with Unreal to get me started with learning the engine, thanks.
I suppose it would be the walls for the most part. The floor is easy enough because it’s a plain either way, but the walls in 2D would also have to be plains and face the camera due to the pixel art choice that I have opted for.
As for 3D, the third axis/ dimension is introduced into the equation, complicating it to a degree, but not too much. I suppose it wouldn’t matter too much if I’m thinking of it relative to the camera.
It sort of also depends on the type of generation, since I’d like my game to have rooms of different shapes, sizes and contents, with doors and corridors splitting them up. With a lot of generators that I’ve seen, they typically keep what is generated quite mundane since the work to get to that point is so great (I assume anyway).
But then it’s always possible that I’m over-complicating things way too much because I’m fresh to the engine and workflow, but I get what you’re saying.
My 2D walls could simply be a stand-in for the 3D walls within the tutorial videos. Now it may just be the case of finding one that meets my requirements, or attempting to make one myself, but from what I have seen of others, that is a huge task to undertake.
You could quite a bit in blueprints once you savvy.
EG: instead of straight-walls, blocks, run a spline-mesh along a curved path to make custom-walls, same with floor and other features. You’re not limited to rigid meshes; pretty much anything the engine can create can be scripted.
Square rooms can also be filled from the corners, walls to create new shapes, and the like.
As far as pixely-type presentation that’s all in the shader/materials layer and can be flexible in it’s own regards. You don’t necessarily have to use a facing-plane for walls, you could use a cube/box-mesh and the shader would make it look all pixely.
Again, all defendant on one’s level of skill and comfort with the engine, but you will have multiple ways to do the ‘same’ thing.