Hey there!
It's been a month, and the second clone - Super Capy Baras - is now ready!
Here's a few snipets (GIFs are really compressed and poo-poo, the art looks better in game, I swear) :
First, a few takeaways I learnt, for those curious:
-No, you won't remember later.
It’s important to note and document things, especially in the blueprints, to understand what's going on when coming back to it later. By the end, I had a lot of stuff in the CapyBara pawn BP, and having to fix bugs 2-3 weeks later once everything was implemented was a bit painfull. And that's for a small, barebone game...
-Reuse your code, don't duplicate.
That was really hard for me. I couldn't find a tutorial making a full mario clone, only snippets there and there. So, I was experimenting a lot, going off multiple different youtube tutorials to create all the mechanics. In the end, a lot of stuff was duplicated, and then worked on appart. I also didn't really create reusable functions. This all became very apparent towards the end, when I had to fix the same bugs mutliple times over and over in mutliple similar blueprints (eg. the different blocks BPs, the different ennemy BPs, etc.), or accross mutliple similar custom events in the same BP.
-To be a good level designer, you need to play A LOT of games.
I barely play platformers, and so, I saw myself struggling to come up with ideas when designing the levels. It’s difficult to understand the fun when you don’t play a lot of games in the genre. I resolved myself to watching gameplay videos, but it’s not the same as having the controller in your hands, feeling the jumps, the level of control in the air, or the tightness of the collisions.
-Unreal is not really built for unlit 2D projects.
After searching online for countless hours, I couldn't find a way to play in Unlit mode. And without that, there's the tonemapper and default Unreal post-process (bloom and vignette) that mess up the 2D look and colors of your sprites - and not just by a small amount. People suggested using a custom post process and playing with those settings:
Turn off Bloom and Vignette, set Slope, Toe and Shoulder to 1.
Meh, it was closer for sure, but not quite the same, especially very bright and dark colors. On top of that, I later found that certain post-processes crash the whole game in HTML5 (play in browser). In the end, I realized that the tonemapper is turned off by default in HTML5 anyways, so, I was good to go in this case. However, for desktop builds, this seems like a pain in ars. Something to think about when making a full commercial 2D game in Unreal, I think.
Alright, now, onto the next clone: Doom !