137 - Unreal Tourney & Community

[matt]

In this diary, I talk about how smart it is for Epic Games to leverage the community in creating the next Unreal game, and how community has helped make Neverending Nightmares possible.

[RightClickSaveAs]

It seems like the modding community has changed a lot. I never did real modding, but I played around with various engines. I mostly just tried to make (awful) maps for Duke Nukem 3D, when the game was already getting old, but man BUILD was such a great, easy engine to learn. It had a lot of quirks but was the most intuitive and easy to learn design environment I've seen. After that I started trying to make maps for Unreal (the first one) and Half-Life, but got overwhelmed pretty quickly as the technology got more complex. It seemed that also applied to modding, major games used to be flooded with mods that were often built by single people, now to make something really cool it seems like it's just not as feasible to do something in a reasonable time period without a team. Maybe giving people a way to monetize it will kickstart the talented people out there and we'll see a new age of cool mods.

Also, you know the guy making Homesick? I'm watching that one, it looks really cool!

[matt]

I think part of the problem with modding these days is just art/content is a LOT harder to make. However, there are game focused schools that basically teach development around game engines. Joe (our lead artist/animator) went to SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), and they taught development in Unreal. Joe removed the screens from his website, but you can still see it in his demo reel at about 1:36.

I suspect a lot of the mods and content for Unreal will come from students and people trying to get started in game development. I think it's going to take a lot of work for people with no experience to get to the point where they can make mods other than perhaps simple rule changes.