Hey Trent! Love your stuff. I used your Diablo 3 Workshop as a workflow tutorial for asset generation for my game and 2 months later, its now fully functional with collisions as all. I still have a long way to go but your workshops are directly responsible for my game coming to life from just some concept art. Your content is unreal. Keep up the awesome work.
I find it super interesting to hear about the problems people encounter along the way during game development and the solutions they find. I`ll watch all your videos about the process!
Please keep the game dev videos coming Trent! I'm working on a 2.5D game in UE5 right now and this video was super helpful and inspiring. Twilight Monk is looking beautiful!
Please create more videos like this, I think it's great to know your experience in this field and how you handle yourself and your team. Thank you. I love your work, and good luck!
Twilight Monk looks absolutely gorgeous, looking forward to the release! I clicked so fast on this notification, I myself am mainly working in Unreal as a 3D game (technical) artist but it's really interesting to see how the engine can be used for 2D.
A lot of people underestimate how important the 'Dev Experience' and fast iteration is. If you hit your framerate target without any issues on all of your platforms then being able to test and implement things FAST will in the end lead to a better product than squeezing out 800 FPS that nobody is gonna use on a 2D platformer. Glad to see Unreal worked out for you.
Oh god don't get me started. The amount of devs I've seen on reddit showing off that their 2D game is hitting 800 fps or w.e... Like yea great, but your engine of choice is quite cumbersome and slow to get things done. Just aim for like 144fps at 1440p and you're fine. You're fine even if you max at 60 fps for some reason.
This video was awesome. I'm an art student studying concept art but i taught myself a bit of game maker for a own metroidvania type game project of mine as well. Compile times and the having to program and time almost every individual object comments were so accurate lol and because of that and the scope of the game Im trying to make, Ive been debating moving over to unreal. Videos like this are literally Perfect for artists like me with interests in both game industry niches!
Trent, the best advice I ever got from you (from many), is the one to start to make my own game! I'm using godot 'cause I'm a sucker for for opensource and I'm learning so muuuuch! Thanks for all the content you've put out!
As someone who is also aspiring to create indie projects and getting used to Unreal Engine, I appreciate your input on this. Thanks for taking the time to share.
The game looks awesome! Anyway, the first point is a big misconception. Parallax can be done quite easily using layers in the editor and just moving these layers in a some controller based on the camera. No need to write code for every sprite, and you definitely don't have to make each image an object. That's a very unfortunate solution... Anyway, I agree with the other points, and most importantly, everyone should be happy with what they do! I wish you the best of luck with the game!
I always hear people changing from Unity to Unreal but as a Game Maker user since 2009 i finally broke away when i wanted to make my "Dream Game" an online multiplayer co-op game. I was able to make it 2.5D and Unreals built in RPC multiplayer is so easy to make a seamless game
Also, UE5 has access to both Fmod and Wwise middleware for audio/music (I believe Gamemaker just had it´s first version on January). Plus the new tools accessible through metasounds, which are craaazy if you know what you are doing! Also the nanites and lumen systems of UE5 are top notch!
Hey Trent, I love your videos and your work! Do you have any plans on making some sort of tutorial video on the process of making a 2.5D game within Unreal Engine? There are not many videos out there about 2D in Unreal Engine, especially where people touch on perspective cameras and they tend to stick with orthographic, but I like how simple yet amazing perspective is, I’m just unsure of how to do it properly. Keep up the great work :)
Very cool video, now I actually want to try Unreal! Thanks for these insights, very helpful stuff for starting out. I spent about a year learning Unity and I am starting to see why different engines have different pros and cons, but right now I am in love with the problem solving aspects of game dev programming.
great video. I'm not using or planning to use GameMaker or Unreal :) but still loved watching this video. Now I'm going trough other videos from this channel :)
I am a subscriber and appreciate you sharing this. I still go back and forth with wanting to start game development and the choices are feel overwhelming at times. There's always a very persuasive video on RU-vid for one engine over another. As a solo developer, who did not study code I'm searching for the path of least resistance to get the prototypes made without spending years learning an engine or giving up. 😓😓 I'm really not wanting to make the next AAA game, 2D sidescroller is perfect for me.
There are a few things that I feel I need to point out. As someone who has around 6 years of experience with GameMaker I really do agree with most of the points in this video. GameMaker is more of a "do it your self" style engine where it is really easy to be picked up by beginner devs but also has a steep learning curve. You could've even pointed out even more cons about GameMaker such as the fact that (for now) there isn't a UI editor and you have to make most of the UI elements yourself by pure code. But there are also some things that you really need to give GameMaker more credit about. The compile times are almost non-existant if you manage your assets correctly and don't load everything at the start of the game especially if you use the newer runtimes. You can make a way easier parallax effect by just writing a few lines of code where the camera takes the depth of the layers into account. Shader compilation problems are almost non-existant in GameMaker while in Unreal you'll almost always need to think of a way to stop the game from freezing while compiling the it's shaders. Generally speaking, GameMaker is kind of the Unreal Engine of 2D games, you gotta take some time to learn all of its drawbacks and then you'll see the full power of the engine.
5 years of GameMaker experience under my belt, and I was glad to see this comment. Like any engine, GM is not without its flaws, but some of the issues mentioned in this video are quite easy to avoid.
@@lRyanI yeah, GM is quite an unusual engine and the workflow in it is a little different than most engines but that doesn't mean things are pain to do in it.
"The compile times are almost non-existant if you manage your assets correctly and don't load everything at the start of the game" Could you elaborate a tiny bit on this part? I have never heard that you can do this in GM. How do you exclude something from being compiled?
@@razmatazz9310 In GameMaker there are texture groups and audio groups. You store your sprites, fonts and tilesets in the texture groups and sounds in audio groups. Texture and audio groups can be made dynamic and not be automatically loaded into memory when the game starts, that's how you reduce the compile and loading times a lot. When you need the unloaded textures and sounds you can manually load them during runtime with loading screens or something like that. In GM memory management is key if you want the best performance out fo your game.
As a animation and VFX student who have gotten to learn Unreal 5, it's nice to see an example that you can make 2D games in this engine. Because I'm more of a 2D artist at heart so it would be so cool to try to make something 2D in Unreal one day.
Man, I've been on the fence choosing a game engine for my own personal project(s), I think you just sold Unreal to me! Nice to hear some gamedev talk here, it's a lot less commonly found on RU-vid. That said, I love your comics and am excited for the Twilight Monk game! Looks amazing, and it's also a huge plus to hear about the development of it. Not too sure if it's the best idea (for you to decide haha), but I'd love to see more on the development of this game. Coming from someone who is hoping to either do concept art for games or make games myself, your channel is a treasure trove. Cheers mate!
I would actually like to see more videos like this. There re so many art and how to draw videos but not as many videos showing you how to take that into games or other media. So if you aren't really into making comics or commissions then there isn't a lot of channels to get input from.
Wait february 2025, that's crazy! I for sure thought it would be late 25 or early 26. Excited to see the full game! Will you make a video about why you didn't go with unity? It's much more geared for 2D than unreal and I think remember you mentioning you didn't like it, but idk why.
maaaybe. I don't know. I had to plan a release date about 2 years ago, and I've known that itll be Feb 2025 since we started. But maybe I haven't really said publicly until this video on accident. Good catch!
This is awesome! How do you handle the lighting on the orange lit cave and the blue lit (dungeon?) areas? That looks like a neat technique but I didn't see a normal map when you were going over your sprites before. Do you handle it at runtime somehow?
@@TrentKaniuga This sounds interesting, do you by any chance have a video for how to do this? Or is this fog sprite material simply using the Pixel Depth Offset?
I did not know you ve developed a game on your own before this one! Very interesting to discover your gamedev side. A few questions, how does it work in terms of version control when you use blueprints? Is it saved as text? Also, at the time, did you consider Unity and Godot?
I honestly don't know what role I want to do in game development. I am creatively minded but have zero talent for creating art and lack the patience for fine detail. But I do enjoy esthetically pleasing art. I definitely enjoy implementing mechanics and learning how things work but I hate programming and again lack the patience for it. But as I am learning and attempting to develop multiple games from different genres, I must do everything myself. From art, lighting, animation, sound design to visual scripting and marketing. My ambition is much greater than my skills 😂. I have always loved unreal engine and it just keeps getting better. I have always wanted to make games since I was 6 years old, I'm about to turn 28. I've been dealing with chronic illnesses since I was 12 years old and that makes it incredibly difficult to do anything. So learning how to make games and put it into practice is my literal mount everest. I could die on this mountain, but I'd rather die than live another year without seeing my dream come true.
Godot might be a good alternative for those people wanting to create a simple game (like those ones on itch you mentionned) as previewing gameplay on the current scene is basically instant like in Unreal. It also has that python-like code language that beginners can "easily" pick up and is generally more beginner-friendly than Unreal (in my opinion having tested both).
It's interesting seeing how others have switched to Unreal from GameMaker, as I've been using GM for years and have built up a nice library of code which is shared across projects. I've always liked GMLs simplicity and forgiveness of bad code, but always disliked that other engines had a lot more tools and functionality built-in. Been looking at finally making the switch with my current workplace using UE5 and the odd ex-workplaces still using Unity.
Game Maker was a no go because my current game is 2D... but the assets are mostly hand drawn and animated in full HD with some environments being painted over 3D models - boss rooms and hubworlds follow your gum road process for certain concept art pieces - basic low poly environment lit in blender and painted over in Krita and Procreate depending on if I'm at work or home. Godot, Unity and Unreal were my choices... and I went with Godot despite learning Unreal 4 in college because it's the lightest hardware requirement wise, has a lot of the same advantages of Unreal like being able to play a scene instantly and having almost no compile time even with HD assets. I'm primariily an artist, but prefer coding in gdscript or C# over blueprints because it makes more sense to me to look at code blocks instead of the mess visual scripting can become.
Hey, you mentioned you having a mac and everyone else having windows, has that been a real challenege for you in game making? I ask because i was looking to get a macbook pro, but I am not sure if that would create a bunch of collaboration conflicts in the game dev world.
I'm shocked that you decided to switch to UE for 2d game. I'd think that Godot or Unity would be a better fit. However I haven't used Paper2D in long time, last time I wanted to it was obsolete, so perhaps it's working fine. Edit: Nvm, seems like you're using UE4.x.
How do you like those compile times? Because that was what made me leave Unreal :D I do agree that quick feedback loops are a must for every type of development. But 15 years ago, I was like: "oh here we go again, compile all the C++ stuff... Let me get some coffee". It seems Unreal has improved upon that. Now compiling C++ has always been slow especially with LLVM C++ compilers. Oh my god they have a node based scripting engine now? That looked like a spaghetti disaster for a seasoned developer like myself :D But that would explain no compile times anymore, it just runs an interpreter -- that does save on compiling your C++ "scripts".
i didn't expect that acutaly. been following quite a lot of game deves and a lot of em use game maker but now you say it they are all pixel games yeah. also most of them are mostly programmers so that makes total sense
Hey Tent, I love all your art and tutorial videos, I am currently a freshman in college and want to get into the concept art industry after graduation but I'm not sure that my current degree caters towards this. I was looking at another university that has a Studio art degree in illustration, design, and animation all put together and was wondering what sort of things should I be looking for in an art degree that will better my skills to get into the career field?
I am currently working in RPGmaker when I have the time. So this is very relative and id say if anything will bring in more audience. But then again that YT algorithm lol
Unreal is nice. Only things I don't like much in it is how bloated it feels (especially for just 2D games), the final application size is huge, and there are some difficulties with exporting/publishing but these are usually possible to work through.
Hey! Do you have any breakdown videos of the 2.5d production techniques shown @6:13 ish. It's really interesting and I'd love to learn how to make these kind of assets
I cant speak for Trent but, I think Unity would have some of the same issues as GameMaker with compile times or version control. Godot has some issues with the stability? Switching to Godot 4.0 broke a lot of stuff and even more so with 4.3. Even looking up stuff they havent updated docs or people still cite 3.3 tutorials. Kinda a pain in the ass, imo.
Unity or Godot would have a lot of the same benefits that Unreal has for a 2D game. Maybe even more features for 2D than Unreal, especially Unity. Unity's pricing fiasco has put off a lot of people from using it in the future. Godot still has growing pains and is harder to port over to Switch/Mobile than Unity and Unreal. And is lacking in some nice features still like fully supported visual scripting for artists/designers. Godot 4 removed it's built in visual scripting but you can use an addon called Orchestrator
Unity would come very close to what Unreal does as far the rendering tech used here, but it's less of a stable game-making platform because of Unity's business model; they've never properly dogfooded it or made a big effort to work out some old, long-lived bugs, they just picked up a lot of customers during the mobile boom, and then wandered off to add features for other customers. Godot has the right kind of architecture for this scope of game and most likely would also work pretty smoothly - it aims to keep the codebase small, simple, and easy to modify, which allows a decent engine programmer to go in and just add the one or two optimizations needed for a specific type of scene instead of configuring a really elaborate general-purpose graphics pipeline - but it's also less mature and doesn't hit Trent's point about being stable. The 3.x to 4.x transition still isn't really over and 4.x is much more ambitious in what it's doing as an engine, so it's also gone back on some of that simplicity.
@@samwilsoncgBoth Unity and Godot compile fater then Unreal in most cases, and have more 2D oriented development tools. For version control, Unity pretty much has all the same features as Unreal. Godots' VC is a lot more simple, however. My best guess as to why they went with Unreal is possibly due to Unity backstabbing devs constantly and Godot is still experiencing a lot a growth, and with that comes a lot of changes to keep track of. Godot also doesn't offer porting tools for consoles.
Going to start my game development masters in a month. I need to start learning one of this platforms but everyone says again and again UE5. Hope it wont break my rather flimzy computer.
I had a lot of fatal errors in unity that required more technical skill than I have. It also seemed like I needed a lot of plugins. Unreal never gave me fatal errors, and came packed with everything I needed for lighting and controller support. Also, unity was toying with that idea of charging devs per game sale. Yuck.
@@TrentKaniuga I see. That totally makes sense. Yes, Unity does come with empty box pretty much & you need to assemble it as per your requirement. Yea, even we are not a fan of Unity toying with the idea of charging devs per game sale.
I am just starting journey of game dev, i had 0 coding exp, or really exp in anything related to game dev, aside from being able to recognize things of what makes games good. I dabbled in Godot, Unity, UE5, and Gamemaker, and originally thought i was going to use Godot, but now I do think I am going to use UE5 as its just got way more options for when I learn more. All of these points even solidify my choice even more.
Interesting. I use Unreal at work for a 3D game, but I've been using Unity for my 2D projects. I hadn't thought to use Unreal in the way you are cause I thought it would be clunky, but you seem to be pulling it off quite well. I would be interested in hearing more about your methods. I'm curious if you could also add normal maps to your sprites to enhance the lighting. That's something that was incorporated into Unity fairly recently and it really helps sell the 2.5D effect by allowing lighting to interact with the sprites like it was 3D surface.
You can add normalmaps to sprites in UE, the sprite editor gives you the option to add one or more additional textures to the sprite, and in the material you can define, how this additional texture will be used, or to which material feature it should be linked. In the material you will see additional slots. And the first additonal slot Zero is already there by default, and and is already connected to the materials normalmap pin. So you just need to click this option and add your normalmap to this slot in the sprite editor. You can add more slots in the material for f.e. emissive materials etc. -> in the material you can add"SpriteTextureParameter" and in their details select to "Sample Additional Textures", which will make this another additional texture slot to use. The real question is, just how much lighting features are too much, before it looks like a 3D model and leads to the question, why not use actual 3D models instead of trying to make 2D sprites look like 3D models? ;)
Ah it's funny your artist has the same name as me. I wonder if he's just a more successful version of me while I'm trying to break into the industry myself lol
You forgot the fact that in Unreal Engine, shader compilation and blueprint compilation add to your dev time as well. And if you're using c++ then you compilation will be even longer. I think that if you account for that, then compilation in GameMaker isn't as bad as you might think it is.
My most complex blueprints take less than 2 seconds to compile and my most complex shaders take less than 5 seconds to compile (though occasionally it likes to recompile shaders when I start up the game for testing, which can take 15-30 seconds). Simple blueprints are like half a second at most and using material instances with a master material is basically no compilation required. This is on my decent laptop now, but I was having similar results on my low-end PC a couple of years ago. C++ can be a nightmare though.
Even then by that point, if you're worrying about large amounts of shader compiling and custom C++ code compiling, you're either a more experienced programmer or you're hiring programmers on your team taking care of C++ side of things and hiring technical artists making complex materials. It's just beyond scrappy artist level of complexity.
Can you say how long shader compilation is in UE4? Also, I'd wish I could be in a position to hire a programmer. How did you get to that place where you can do that? Thx
I worked at Blizzard and Riot for 25 years and then quit so that I could build a prototype. I announced prototype, and then got publishing offers. Its THAT easy! hah.
@@TrentKaniuga Ah good for you! I also know someone from raylib forums who worked at Blizz. As for me, I guess, not much chance in my current situation. I have some very original idea, but working on them myself gets too much, and programming makes me literally fell asleep and takes ages. These days most of us have to grind ourselves. i used to write good music and was a music director at indie game company for several years, but due to personal issue had to take a long break. But would finance from that if I'd still be going.
