Mother 4

A personal, EarthBound-inspired 2D RPG built in Unreal Engine 5 — a project to explore UE5's 2D toolset and build a bespoke, data-driven tilemap pipeline from scratch.

An overhead, EarthBound/Mother-style world rendered with sprite tiles and flipbook characters. The point of the project was less "ship a game" and more to learn UE5's 2D pipeline end to end — sprite animation, Enhanced Input, and especially how to author large tile maps as plain text and bake them into the engine.

Highlights

• 🗺️ Custom text-driven tilemap pipeline — levels are authored as human-readable .map files (<symbol> = <tileIndex> [@ <layer>] legends + an ASCII grid) and baked into UE tile maps via a MapBaker actor and a BakeTileMap commandlet. Edit a map in any text editor, re-bake, done.
• 🧩 Autotiling reference for the tileset — every tile's four edges were classified into material codes so terrain (grass, cliffs, water, sand, roads) connects by edge compatibility. The full analysis lives in Docs/OnettTileset_Reference.md: 848 tiles, edge-class matching, verified multi-tile "stamp" blocks, and overlay props.
• 🎞️ 2D character animation with PaperZD — directional idle/walk flipbooks driven by an animation blueprint and a directionality state machine.
• 🎮 Enhanced Input — movement mapped through an Input Mapping Context (IMC_Player) and Input Actions.
• 🧱 C++ gameplay layer — character, HUD, a Blueprint function library, and the tilemap importer/baker are all implemented in C++ (Source/MyProject).

How the tilemap pipeline works

  onett.map  ──▶  MapBaker actor / BakeTileMap commandlet  ──▶  UE Tile Map asset  ──▶  Level
  (plain text)     (reads legend + grid, resolves tiles,        (Content/…)
                    places them across layers)

A .map file declares a legend (symbol = tile index @ layer) and then draws the level as a grid of those symbols. The baker parses it, looks up each tile on the tilemap_TileSet sheet, and places it — so map design happens in text and version-controls as clean diffs, instead of being trapped in a binary editor.

Project structure

Source/MyProject/     C++ gameplay — MyCharacter, Player1, HudBB,
                      MapBaker, BakeTileMapCommandlet, TileMapImporterLibrary, …
Content/Blueprints/   BP_Player, animation blueprint, input actions
Content/Maps/         onett.map, probe.map  (text source maps)
Content/Sprites/      tileset sheet + character sprites
Docs/                 OnettTileset_Reference.md — the autotiling analysis

Built with

Unreal Engine 5.8 · C++ · PaperZD (2D animation) · Enhanced Input

Getting started

1. Install Unreal Engine 5.8 and the PaperZD plugin.
2. Clone the repo and open MyProject.uproject (let it build the C++ modules on first launch).
3. Open Content/Levels/Mother4.umap and press Play.

To re-bake a text map, edit a file in Content/Maps/ and run the BakeTileMap commandlet (or drop a MapBaker actor into the level and trigger it).

Notes

This is a non-commercial personal/learning project inspired by the Mother / EarthBound series. Any third-party sprite, tileset, or reference assets remain the property of their respective owners and are used here only for study.