Topic: [2D Experiment] BeanMan's Bazooka Battle!
I have created a simple game using UFE and Unity's 2D Platformer tutorial package. Click the above image to play it on the website! See how big a combo you can get .
You can read about the project on the game's website. In the interest of the UFE community, I'll detail some UFE specific stuff below:
Goals
Make a UFE game using 2D graphics;
Use as few mods as possible - to make sharing the project easier;
I think I've achieved both these goals. The game may not be perfect or completely polished, but I think it's good enough to showcase what's possible with UFE and 2D visuals. And in making these assets available (coming soon ), I'm hoping others can expand on it and make their own 2D games with UFE.
Development
It took 3 days to complete the project, and the first day was mostly figuring out the best way to handle 2D images. I knew that I wanted the Puppet2D like effect, and I also thought that this effect should be possible in UFE without any mods. Hitboxes are assigned to bone transforms after all, not the bones themselves exactly. So why not just assign the hitboxes to transforms of sprites?
Deciding to use Unity's 2D Platformer project made a lot of sense at this point.
From there, it was just a matter of creating the animations in Unity, which was surprisingly easy considering the tools you've got to work with. I didn't use any plugins to help animate, it was all in the Unity Scene Editor and Animation window.
There's a bit of a workflow in creating the animations. I can detail that in a follow up post if anyone is interested.
At first, there were many issues with some body parts scaling/rotating and not scaling/rotating back when changing between animations. This issue is avoidable of course - you just need to have zero scale/rotation keys on all the other animations. I recommend initial testing with few moves/animations to work through this problem, otherwise you've got a lot of animations to clean up!
Note that in the game some of these issues are still present. But they didn't effect gameplay too badly and I didn't want to spend too much time on the project cleaning up these things.
Swish Particles
Each swish particle is created (including its rotation) for that specific move. Potentially I could use a unique sprite animation for each attack. But it would mean more sprite resources per character, as opposed to relying on particles to achieve a similar results in 3D.
In theory, it should be possible to create these within the character's animation clips too, we'd just need to have enabled/disable keys for the animations that don't use it. But I can see it become more resource intensive depending on how you do it.
There's more to write, but I'll leave that for another time. Have a play of the game, I hope you enjoy it! I'll make the assets available soon.