Stripping the engine for barebones 2D

Hi there, I wanted to know, if it’s possible to use the unreal engine in a modular fashion. Using for instance, only the renderer of the engine, and only the opengl es 2.0(and also webgl 1.0) renderer in my case. I was thinking about building my own, small and to the point, solution for a project. But if UE allows that sort of thing, maybe I could just use what epic has built instead.

In my case I was looking to use the engine exclusively for 2D, but I’m not familiar with how the source code is setup. Truth be told if the entire rendering pipeline can simply be reduced to basic drawing of quads and such, with shaders on the side, that would be a good starting point.

If anyone has any experience in trying to use the engine in a modular fashion like that, only keeping the parts that you need, I’d greatly appreciate the feedback.

Thanks either way.

Hi Kiori7,

Unreal Engine is quite a massive piece of software that is not easy to take apart. If you strictly need a small middleware for drawing 2D shapes then probably UE is not what you are looking for. However, if you are looking for a complete engine to make a 2D game then Unreal might be the right choice!

Paper 2D | Unreal Engine Documentation - documentation for Paper2D
UMG UI Designer | Unreal Engine Documentation - documentation for Unreal’s UI system