(Megagrant) Pixel2D - The sequel to Paper2D. Complete 2D platformer solution.

Community Marketplace
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Get it here: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…ine-for-unreal

Hey,
For the past year or so I’ve been working on a secret project for the marketplace. It’s called Pixel 2D and it’s sort of a beefed up sequel to my previous 2D platformer pack. While that was in development for 2 months or so, this was developed by a 2 man team in the span of over a year. We’ve invested a lot of time and effort into this to make it the ultimate solution for any 2D game developers.
While Paper2D is currently not in development and still has a lot of missing features, this is where Pixel 2D comes in and tries to address some of the limitations and turn Unreal into a proper 2D solution.

**If you feel the thread is too long, this is an older video I’ve sent to Epic last month for consideration for their Epic Megagrants program. A lot of features were added and polished since **then!

Now to the good part! A public roadmap can be found here : Trello

Almost everything is component-based, so you are free to pick and choose which features you want to use for your game just by adding/removing the necessary component.

Major features below:

  • **Added AnimBP/State machine **support to flipbooks as well. Now you can handle flipbook animations just like regular 3d animations.

https://i.imgur.com/hdoxwEC.png

  • Added anim notifies inside flipbooks. You can send a custom notify and specific frames and access it from other blueprints. Great for dealing damage at certain frames or making sounds or effects. Possibilities are numerous.

  • New layer system and sorting. We’ve added a custom layer and sprite sorting system so you can manage your scene more easily and avout Z-fighting.

  • Added destroyable tilesets.

  • Dynamic combat system

    • Spheretrace and socket based melee system.

    • Ranged combat supporting different types of ammunition with custom effects.

    • Physics based grenade system.

    • Due to the nature of the component based workflow both the player and any other actors can take advantage of the combat system.

The list is not quite exhaustive but it should cover the major points. The kit is nearing a releasable state and we are aiming for an Autumn 2019 release. Meanwhile please any suggestions and questions and concerns you might have , please share them in the thread. Also I will be needing a few testers as release approaches. If anyone wishes to join the upcoming closed beta test, please let me know if the thread and we can discuss when the time is near.

Release date : Spring 2020

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  • Added some basic sound management for the most important actions.

Still looking for a couple of potential interested testers. Please reply here or pm me directly.

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looks cool. is it blueprints only?

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What Kind of example games can we expect?

I personally am looking forward to a 2D top down example.

Will you take advantage of the recently added animation sub graphs?

Will you add something like this as an example to pixel2D?

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Hi,
To answer your questions.

  1. A top down example zelda style game is planned, though possibly not for the initial launch. Update 1 most likely.
  2. Flipbooks are very different from regular animations. They are just a series of images. They do not support things like animation blending or blendspaces and so on. Sub anim instances are something that cannot be done with flipbooks at this point.
  3. I had an old experiment doom clone using just blueprints a couple of years ago. It does seem like it could fit with the 2D theme. I will add it as an example game as well.
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Looks amazing. I hope this will make creation of 2D games much more easier.

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Hey,
It should make them significantly easier and allow for more complex 2D games to be made with Unreal as well.

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Very nice work! :slight_smile: How about if i wanted to use Spine for characters (using the spine plugin) - could it be possible together with pixel 2D ?

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Hi,
Spine uses it’s own animation system so you most likely won’t be needing my custom anim BP solution, but other than that sure. Everything should work just fine.

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It’s more than clear that this project deserves $25K+ from Epic MegaGrants.

The combo Unity + Corgi Engine is making some noise at the “2D Dev Scene”, that’s why your “Pixel2D Platformer Solution” is a “Game Changer” for Unreal Engine.

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Thanks for the encouragement. My goal was to give Unreal engine something as good as or even better than the corgi engine for unity.

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Hi guys, quick update. Still working on this around the clock to finish it. You can check the progress on the trello board.

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It’s looking good!

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Thank you!

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How’s it going? Are things still moving smoothly?

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Mostly working on the art and demo level and the final boss fight.
Waiting for Epic to get back to me regarding my application to epic mega grants
If it’s positive I will be able to get someone ASAP to help me with the art and bugfixing.
If it’s negative I still intend to release it this autumn, but some of the features that were planned for 1.0 will be moved to 1.1.I think this is the best approach since I want to get it into people’s hands as soon as possible.

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[SIZE=16px][SIZE=14px]Hey guys. In preparation for the release, I have made a playable demo to showcase some of the features.
Please read the readme before playing.
Let me know what you think!

Thanks![/SIZE][/SIZE]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bmH…e5J-oiMAc/view

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That was pretty cool. I’m normally a gamepad person but got used to the controls ok. Only issue I came across was with the final boss. I had kicked one of those crates with me to the end where the boss is and I could stand on it and the boss would just keep running back and forth and no longer attack me so i was able to kill him easily by just standing there and firing arrows at him. He attacks when i’m on the ground but not while standing on the box.

Nice work though. Performance was great.

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  • Glad the performance was good. The computers I have at home are relatively high end. What was your spec?
  • There is gamepad control but was disabled since it’s not 100% working with the inventory system yet.
  • Nice exploit on the boss :D. The reason for that is how the AI works. It checks if it can reach your exact position. If not then it checks the closest position on the X and Z axis it can reach you. Then it compares it with his margins and decides from there. Since I didn’t expect a box to be there I kept his margins low, but with just a change of a variable ( increasing the Z tolerance), the boss can work perfectly fine.
  • I’ve tried to make the AI system as configurable as possible
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I’m running an I7 3770K - 16MB Ram - GPU: GTX980Ti

Gamepad support will be great for those like me. Nice to see it’s an easy fix regarding the Boss and the AI.

I would love to create a 2D game at some stage. Anything that makes it as painless as possible is great.