Blog
UDK
So in my spare time I have been learning as much as I can about the Unreal Development Kit, which is free to use if you follow the agreement. So now you may ask why have I been doing this, well you see the beauty of this development kit is it gives you a fully working game engine that you create a game with. This allows you more time to focus on making a game fun, and allows you the ability to prototype ideas faster. So in a development environment you all the time you put into a project costs money and time, if you make your own game engine that can require massive amounts of time and when you finally get to the part where you are making the game, you may find out “Wow this game sucks and isn’t any fun at all”. Now I’m not saying thats going to happen but it can happen. So say you spend a year doing that and you realize this, well now your out a year of time and whatever else you invested into it. Now an alternative option to this is to use for example (there are other alternatives) the Unreal Development Kit, now with this lets say it takes you half the time it took you to make your game. Well thats only in this case 6 months, so you have only invested 6 months of time to realize wow this game sucks. Now, because you have only invested 6 months you can sit back and evaluate is there a way to make this better, if not you can get to work on the next thing right away. I believe this is a much better way to develop, for smaller companies that cant afford to sink money into long development cycles it allows them to rapidly prototype their stuff before the decide to invest x amount of time and money into the project. Now lets say you finish developing this game with the Unreal Development Kit and you are like wow I really like the way this is turning out and want to just want release it commercially with the Unreal Engine. Well this to me is not a bad deal at all. It costs $99 dollars for a Royalty Bearing license, now I’m not going to into all the fine details, but this allows you to distribute your product and Epic gets 25% of your revenue after the $5,000 revenue mark. So if your product makes $25,000 in revenue then you have to give Epic $6,250 of that. Now I don’t know about everyone else but to me that is not that bad of a deal, with everything that the Unreal Engine has to offer. To me allows small teams the ability to compete against large development studios.
Any information you want on the Unreal Development Kit can be found here:
