Unreal Developer Kit

[Tek7]

Epic Games has released the Unreal Developer Kit - a fully functional version of Unreal Engine 3, complete with development tools, that's free for non-commercial projects. That's right, you can create full, standalone games using the UE3 tools and easily redistribute them, all free of charge.

For commercial use, you'll need to buy a $99 royalty-bearing license if you plan to sell your game. There's more expensive full license, but that won't apply to most game developers.

With the Make Something Unreal contest drawing to a close, the UDK is sure to pick up where UT3's mod contest left off in terms of inspiring rising stars of game development. Alongside today's release of the UDK toolset come demo versions of "The Ball" and "Wizzle" built using UDK.

Source: Epic Unleashes Unreal Developer Kit

Makes me wish I have skills relevant to game development (other than writing out pages of design notes).

 

[vibrokatana]

Makes me wish I have skills relevant to game development (other than writing out pages of design notes).

The average 3D game takes years to make with several dozen people in different technical fields (programming, graphics design, sound, story and concept) and you typically have several people specialized at different tasks (texturing vs 3d modeling), network/ai/game programming, etc. Even a relatively simple 2d game can take months.

 

[Tek7]

The average 3D game takes years to make with several dozen people in different technical fields (programming, graphics design, sound, story and concept) and you typically have several people specialized at different tasks (texturing vs 3d modeling), network/ai/game programming, etc. Even a relatively simple 2d game can take months.

Most of the game ideas I have are conservative in scope, though I have notes for an RPG from (I'd guess) 13 years ago that imagine a game on a much larger scale. My idea was to build a name and some revenue with the first two titles, then work on something larger for a third title.

Unfortunately, it's all just a daydream right now, anyway. I'm in the wrong place (Midwest US) at the wrong time (economic downturn) to break into the games industry and work my way up to Producer.