A quick-start dev blog covering Unreal Engine, Maya, and the real tools used to build indie games from scratch.
Already have an Unreal Engine Third Person project? You’re most of the way to a side-scroller without knowing it. With a handful of Blueprint edits and a few camera tweaks, you can have it running in under 15 minutes. Here’s exactly how.
Start With What Unreal Already Gives You
Open your Third Person project and copy the default Third Person Character into your own project folder. While you’re in there, also copy everything inside the Inputs folder. These give you a solid, pre-wired foundation to modify rather than build from scratch.
Remap Movement From Horizontal to Forward
Open your copy of the Third Person Blueprint and find the Move function. This is where the lateral movement lives and it’s the first thing that needs to change.
Delete the Get Right Vector node — left and right are gone now. Remove the Control Rotation node and its connected Add Movement Input node along with it.
In their place, add a Get Forward Vector node. Reconnect it where the right vector was, route the Z output into the Z pin on Get Controller Rotation, and connect the Return Value into World Direction. Your character now moves along a single forward axis — exactly what a side-scroller needs.
Lock the Camera to a Fixed Side View
Find the Camera component in your character hierarchy. Look for these three settings and turn them all off if they’re enabled: Inherit Pitch, Inherit Yaw, and Inherit Roll. A side-scroller camera shouldn’t be rotating with the player.
Position the camera to the side of your character rather than behind it. A Z rotation value of around 90 degrees is a reliable starting point — adjust from there based on your scene.
Strip Out the Unused Camera Controls
Head to the Event Graph and look for the cluster of nodes handling camera rotation input. In a third person setup these let the player swing the camera around — none of that applies anymore. Select those nodes and delete them. Cleaner graph, one less system to worry about.
Add Camera Lag for a Polished Feel
Select the Camera Boom Arm component, open Details, and search for lag. Enable Camera Lag. This adds a slight delay to how the camera follows the character and makes movement feel noticeably smoother and more intentional. It’s a one-checkbox improvement that punches above its weight.
Fix the Drift Most Developers Miss
This is the step that trips people up. Without it your character will slowly drift forward or backward along the depth axis while moving, which looks wrong and feels worse.
Select the Character Movement Component, open Details, and search for constrain. Check on Constrain to Plane, then set the axis to Y — the axis your character runs along. That’s it. The drift stops.
Watch the video tutorial: https://youtube.com/shorts/71pFC0dc19U?feature=share
Swap In Your Own Character
At this point the side-scroller logic is complete. If you want to replace the default mannequin with your own skeletal mesh and animation blueprint, Unreal Engine 5 has a streamlined way to retarget an entire animation set to a new skeleton in just a few steps. That process deserves its own breakdown — coming in a future post.
That’s a working Unreal Engine side-scroller converted from a Third Person template with no plugins and no paid assets. Just Blueprints and a few settings most tutorials skip over.
Thanks for reading — and Krack Karen thanks you as well.
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