Need guidance porting my existing 2d game to UE5

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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Hello everyone, I’m looking for guidance as I dive into creating my first full Mobile UE5 based project. I’m trying to figure out the best approach to bring my current Unity game/prototype over to UE5. I have already exported the swipe menu to my iPhone and it was a simple process. game prototype - YouTube

I’m wondering whether it would be better to implement the game using UMG/Widget/BP or in 3D space like in this example. Tutorial: 3D widget interaction - Unreal Engine 4 + Unreal Engine 5 - YouTube

Keep in mind the game will have a fixed perspective like UMG, but I would like to incorporate physics and lighting down the line, which makes me think the latter path may be better. However, I’m concerned about how it will scale to different devices since it’s for mobile.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

@SupportiveEntity You gave some solid 2D advice in another topic.

thx much!

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Hey there @tbelgrave! So in most use cases you’d be correct to use UMG for the exclusive UI elements, but for the game elements it’d definitely be best to either use Sprites(Paper2D) or Meshes for anything you’re going to be using lighting or physics. So in the example you showed, UMG would be great for the keyboard and text portion, but for the images you’d have the choice between billboards or meshes.

Scalability on mobile is definitely an important concern, light physics one just a handful of actors is usually fine for even the cheaper tiers of smartphones, lighting has to be relatively simple however as depending on how many objects there are in your scene it can get expensive for the economy tiers of phones if your scenes are both movable and complex.

Here’s the docs for mobile lighting and what is supported:

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Amazing! THx much for another solid answer, just what I was looking for. I didn’t think of Paper2D in UMG so this has me even more excited as I wanted to use that at some point. Appreciate it SE!

Cheers
~t

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No worries! I do offer one caveat, UE5 is a bit more expensive than UE4 especially in terms of mobile games, even with similar settings and setup. So if you haven’t fully ported everything that might be another choice to make in the meantime. I wish there were more resources for mobile optimizations, but for the most part try to keep the amount of lit movable actors down, unless your game requires full lighting. If possible do early stress testing because it’s tough to nail down for older devices if you don’t have any to test on!

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This is a very good keep in mind. I’ll limit it to UMG as much as possible for sure. I don’t believe I’ll do much in the way of lighting for this particular game. K.I.S.S. will apply here :slight_smile: Thx again

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