Gadgetory

so if you want to make a game for Android but I don't actually recommend that you use Android studio instead it makes a lot more sense to you something like unreal or unity those being game engines that already have lots of the physics and lots of the behavior of different game elements in place for you and have a nice graphical interface to make things really nice and simple I've touched on this channel a fair bit about using unity for game development it is the preferred method it's the most popular game engine on the Play Store but Unreal 4 is the biggest competitor to unity either way whichever one you choose both of these are great tools for Android game development and make everything really simple and easy and a really flexible you can create anything you can think of pretty much of course you need to get started somewhere though and the first time you boot up Unreal 4 it's kind of like oh it's got a lot of Windows a lot of stuff going on it's quite confusing there are lots of tutorials out there but quite a lot of them involve a lot of preamble of setting up a lot of technical jargon you don't really need to know right away ain't nobody get down put it and so in this video I want to once again show you how to get something quite impressive up and running in just seven minutes there's not going to be a full game you probably won't want to sell this it won't even have enemies or levels or anything like that but you will have a basic platform that you can control with touchscreen controls you can jump around have your own animations your own sprites and my hope is that this is gonna serve as enough of a starting point so that you can get a bit excited about Unreal development and also so that you can understand the big picture of how everything works then you can build from there by using those other more granular tutorials so without any further ado let's get started and build an android game using unreal in just seven minutes to get started first you're going to need to create a new project you'll see we have lots of options available to us which will be suitable for different types of game we want to choose to the side scroller then set it from mobile or tablet with maximum quality and including the starter content the top tab should say blueprint rather than C++ as this means we won't need any coding in order to get things up and running once that's finished you'll see that you already have a playable platform game you've got character you've got platforms hit play and click on the viewport and you'll be able to run around jump and watch the pretty animations using the spacebar and arrow keys and so there you have it your first 2d game in just 20 seconds lulz ok so obviously we going to be doing a bit more than that more specifically we're going to customize all these elements that are already here so that you can turn this generic prototype into the basis for your unique game with your own graphics and animations to create new actors for our game the generic term for any game object I'm using the existing sprites folder drop a PNG or other image file into there using the File Explorer then right click on it and go to sprite actions create sprites now head to the blueprints folder right click again this time anywhere in the folder then select the create basic asset blueprint class and finally actor this is a class that will allow us to create lots of different iterations of the same object say a platform if you're familiar with unity it's the equivalent of a prefab call this floor tile or tile or something like that now a double-click on that new blueprint class to open up the editor in the top left select add component and then choose sprite you can search it's quicker now select that new element in the components window and then drag and drop your platform sprite into the sprite box you can now see that the tile is part of your platform don't forget to adjust the scale if your sprite isn't already the perfect size click Save then return to your game once you've done that you can simply drag and drop this new element anywhere into your game when you drop your platform into the level make sure that the y-coordinate which for some reason behaves like a Z coordinate is set to 0 otherwise it might be in front or behind the player and the player won't interact with the collider you'll notice your platform already has a Collider that's the yellow box which tells unreal that your player shouldn't be able to pass through the item copy and paste this tile around a little bit drag it and that way you can start designing your own level and of course delete the old platforms as well of course you can create many more actors and drop them into your levels like this by using different sprites different settings and different logic via graphs many of which can easily look up online you'll be able to create a whole host of challenging obstacles and rewarding collectables to further customize the level we might also want to change to the background do this simply by selecting background sprites in the world outliner and then changing the source sprite to one of your own making in details I'm using a starry sky I created the last and possibly most important thing we need to change though to make this generic platformer into our platformer is the main character to handle this we're going to need to use some more sprites which we're going to turn into animation now create two new sub folders idle and walking into each we're going to drag and drop our character sprites instead of using a sprite sheet we're adding individual images and naming them in ascending numerical order to keep things nice and simple drop these into the relevant folders right click on them and then select sprite actions create sprites once again we'll make our idle animation first I only have two images for this which is meant to simulate kind of breathing in a low frame pixel art manner a quick tip if you choose pixel art you have far less work to do to set this up right-click in the folder and choose animation paper flip book flip books is just the term that unreal uses for its animations name your new animation idle and then double-click to open it up now in here you're going to head over to where it says sprite then you're going to add two keyframes by hitting the plus button or you can just drag and drop your images into the kind of timeline down the bottom this will add two members you'll see the animation begins to cycle through those frames immediately right now though this is CG inducing so turn down the framerate to something like five and it looks a lot more like breathing save and an exit and now you can do the precise same thing with your walking animation keeping the framerate higher of course and adding more keyframes save that and once they're both done you can head over to finally 2d side-scroller character actor or porn over m 2d side-scroller VP blueprints double-click on this and you'll open up the editor again but this time you might see something a little bit different a graph remember that we chose graphs instead of C++ when we set up the project basically this means that we're using a visual flow chart of sorts in the place of actual code which is great if you don't know a lot of programming zoom out find the box that says handle animation and then finally drop down menus under select these will look a little familiar idle animation and running animation all you need to do is to click those buttons and swap them out for the ones you created finally flick over to the viewport window and find the box that says source flipbook on the right once you've selected the player-character switch that for your own idle animation and make sure to edit the scale under the transform heading on the right to match your character to the size of the original one remember to hit compile and save once that's done and with that done you should now see that it's your own character running around using your own animations unlevel that you designed the look of and the layout of to run this on your device simply go to file package project and Android you'll then be able to create an apk which you can pop onto your device to test you should have a working basic platformer with touch input and animations it's a pretty exciting start bearing in mind we've only spent seven minutes remember though you'll need to have set up all of this correctly to begin with that means setting up unreal in order to work with Android my advice is to remove Gradle support for the build as at the moment that isn't quite working correctly I'd also advise using code works for Android to install all the necessary elements like the Java SDK thanks time for watching guys hope fans really useful and interesting if you did then please share around please leave a like please comment down below all that stuff helps us out immensely you can find the full more in-depth tutorial the written version over at Andrew thority com there you'll also find all the usual news reviews features etc for of course we are your source for all things Android