Tag Archives: company

GDC 2015 – Unreal Engine 4 VS Unity 5

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I shouldn’t be spending time writing more blog posts, but this was a big week for game developers big and small. GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) had some great announcements.

Oculus Rift still doesn’t have a set release date, although most sites state it will formally release before the end of 2015. And it better… plenty of competitors from Sony, HTC, and others are racing to beat it, and will release early 2016. I’m still excited for the opportunities of VR.

NVIDIA announced the greatest thing ever: an Android TV. Like the ones we’ve had for the last five years. Except it’s slightly higher quality, and they are using a high-powered mobile chip to encourage developers to port their last-gen games to Android with the new box. More importantly, they’ve announced a sort-of Netflix for films, which again kind of existed but still has opportunity for improvement. Imagine streaming games at high-quality purely based on your Internet connection rather than your computer’s own graphics card. The thing is, my mid-range-graphics card is much better than any Internet connection in my town. Regardless, I hope it works.

More importantly, Unreal Engine 4 is now outright free. It was already cheap at $19 a month (with an easy-to-quit subscription, so it was basically $19 for the whole engine), but now there’s no excuse to not give it a try. The only barrier is that standard percentage after you make more than $3000 profit. Also, a few weeks ago they announced a new grant program to give money to small developers to use their engine. At a time when Unity 5 and Source 2 are also released, it’s hard to say that Unreal isn’t worth at least looking at.

So I looked at it. As a experienced Unity developer, did I like Unreal? Well…

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Good Leadership

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For the last few years, I was a (semi) active member of my school’s game development club. Last year, it was almost disbanded due to a lack of members, which was due to a lack of a leader. I stepped in at the last minute, but missed opportunities ensured no one knew we existed that year. Thankfully, a new group of friends were much more involved the following term and invested in taking the club in a new direction.

Having been a “leader” for this club for a short time, another student one day asked me how to get friends involved and invested in working on a team project. It was a general question that could be used for club leaders, class projects, or general fun stuff to do with your friends or family. If you have a project to finish, and are able to get other people to join your “team,” how can you get them to contribute and get excited in the project as much as you are? Having been a poor club leader, I had no real answers. It didn’t help that people in my area happen to be very laid-back and uninvested in general (whether this has to do with being Canadian, being from Windsor, or being from my lazy generation, I may never know). But after seeing a handful of ambitious students struggle to encourage involvement, including my own experiences, I think I see several cases where people have gone wrong. I hope this post helps guide wannabe directors and leaders in the right direction. Keep in mind that there are thousands of other good website posts that also state similar advice (see wikihow or google), but mine comes from my personal experience as an indie game developer and as a student, even though it can likely be applied elsewhere for project-based work.

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New 2D Faces on 3D Characters – 2D Live Euclid

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CES 2015 happened last week. Beautiful tvs, new laptops and tablets, a lot of car-tech… but I’m going to talk about an innovation from about a month ago that’s more up my alley.

Most of the posts on this blog makes it clear that I like 2D animation. My first game (which got Greenlit on Steam recently, I’ll talk about that more in a few weeks) is one of the first truly 3D games that has a hand-drawn character. I did this because I am annoyed that no one has really done that before. However, “Live2D” is a company that has been trying hard to make it easier for developers to do that, and so their latest effort, “Live2D Euclid,” comes closer than ever. Their website is available here: http://www.live2d.com/en/ , and a video of their latest technology can be seen here:

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2015…

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Happy new year!

Yes, it’s already 2015. What have I done in 2014? Let’s see… I did finish and release my first independent game “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth.” It was nice to have finally finished something I was proud of, and to learn about self-promotion and different distribution sites. Expect a detailed report in post-mortem posts later in January. I got that Bachelor’s degree, and am on track to finish a Master’s degree within a year. I submitted one research paper to another academic conference in the states. I got over 1,000 twitter followers, and yet barely any action from my Facebook company page (note to other developers: don’t bother making a Facebook company page). Not too bad, although looking back, I think I was hoping to do more…

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