The Ultimate Unreal Engine 2D Game Development Course

Welcome to The Ultimate Unreal Engine 2D Game Development Course.

This is the most comprehensive and effective course you’ll ever find about making 2D and 2D/3D hybrid games with Unreal Engine 5.

Through teaching Unreal Engine on YouTube and also in person at a Japanese Game Dev for the past couple of years I’ve gained an understanding of what students are really looking for and designed this course to teach you Paper 2D and PaperZD step by step in a structured manner.

If you’re completely new to Unreal Engine you can check out the Unreal Engine 5 Crash Course which is included in one of the early chapters.

We’ll start out slowly by making a one-button-minigame that teaches you about how to import sprites and use them in your scene. You’ll also learn about project settings we need to adjust and about the enhanced input action system which we’ll use throughout all of the other chapters in this course as well.

The second game will teach you all about using sprite sheets and how we can create flipbooks.
We’ll also look at how to switch between the idle and run flipbook during gameplay and how to play footstep sounds on the correct animation frames.
Since we want the background to be dynamically adjustable I’ll also teach you how we can use a background sprite in a blueprint, attach collisions to them and dynamically change them in the construction script depending on how long we want the stage to be.

The Third game is a classic platformer game and will be the first projects using the free PaperZD plugin to improve the workflow of making 2D games with Unreal Engine.

Here you’ll learn how to set up an animation source and animation blueprint file with PaperZD and use them to create animation graphs and animation notifies.
We’ll also create enemies that can detect walls and ledges to change the direction they walk in and can interact with the player when being stomped on or touching the player character.
You’ll also learn how to create a one-way platform that we can jump through form the bottom, but don’t fall through from the top.

The forth game will combine all the things we’ve learned and will be the first 2D/3D hybrid game we create.
This means that our characters are 2D pixel art, however the backgrounds are 3D environments which allow us to make use of all of the amazing features of Unreal Engine.
For this game we don’t only have platformer mechanics, but we’ll also implement hitboxes, a stun system a damage system and many more things you’ll need to know about for most of your games.

To lean into metroidvania mechanics we also create an unlockable sword throw ability, which allows you to stick swords into the wall and use them as platforms to reach higher areas.