🎮 Platformer Survival 2.0 An Unreal Engine 4 Game
A brief experience with Unreal Engine 4
After making the browser game in this post - Platformer Survival, I thought I would try to recreate it in Unreal Engine 4. This is back around 2019 I believe. I wanted to get a taste using a popular game engine and see how it compared to my web browser game.
💰 Unreal Engine
One cool thing about Unreal Engine is that it's free to use until your title gains over 1 million dollars in revenue. Then there is a 5% royalty.
📚 Learning the Ropes
I mostly followed this tutorial to learn how to make a 2D game - Unreal Engine 4 - Making a 2D Platformer in UE4
🛠️ The Challenges and Rewards of Game Development
Making games is a lot of fun but a lot of work as well. Game engine's make it easier of course, but simple things like menus and UI can take more time to develop than you would like. You might notice my game has little to none.
The drag and drop style of Unreal Engine is nice, but it's still a lot of work to get things to look and work the way you want them to. You can edit and write C++ code but I never got to that point. Below are some screenshots of the player blueprint I made, where you can see nodes being dropped in and connected up.
🌐 The Fun of Creating Your Own Game
What's fun about making you're own game is you can control everything. You can make the character jump super high or enemies spawn in really fast. It's like modding a game but you're making the game. Also what's interesting about making a 2D game in UE is that technically it's a 3D game, the camera is just locked to a 2D plane. So when making the game you're working in a 3D space like below.
🎨 Animation in Game Development
Animation is another thing that takes a lot of time. It's easier with a pixelated 2D game. The way it works in my game is each animated object or character is a sprite sheet. Which is similar to creating an animation on a pad of sticky notes. The character is designed in several different poses and then the game engine will cycle through the poses to create the animation, in a flipbook style.
🕹️ Play the Game on itch.io!
I do have the game posted on itch.io so if you're interested you can play it. It's only compatible with Windows however. The itch.io page should have details and instructions. Thanks!