Tag Archives: video game

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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“Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” is now available on Steam!

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It’s official. After months of work and blatant self-promotion, “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” is available to buy, download and play from Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/346200/

Well, technically, it’s been on Steam since last week, on February 4. As a reminder, it is also available on Desura and IndieGameStand. And like those other stores, there’s a launch discount of 25% off, ends in two days.

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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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The Revolution Is Here, The Internet Is Not Ready

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It’s been some time since I ranted about something. So I’ll talk about an old topic.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity came out a couple months ago. Note that they didn’t call it AC 5, even though it is probably more worthy of the number than AC 4 was. I haven’t played the game, so keep that in mind that I can’t speak much to whether or not the game is fun (although it received good review scores, yet lower than any AC game). A part of me laughs when I hear how it’s the first new-generation AC game and how it uses new advanced AI, which really only means larger crowds and means nothing for actual AI. Anyway…

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An Update From Your Friendly Neighbourhood Gamedev

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I should write more posts. Especially this month, there have been a ton of new announcements.

Those video game awards 2014 were cool, although the only big announcement I got from it was that Nintendo’s new Zelda for Wii U is worth buying a Wii U for and that Nintendo might best Sony and Microsoft in 2015. Sony’s new PSX happened, and a few cool demos came from it. Street Fighter V is PS4/PC exclusive, and doesn’t look that great, albeit it looks like what SF IV should have looked like, instead of those awkward jagged poly-models everyone said looked incredible. New game “Drawn to Death” looks like good fun, but it tries to mimic pen-drawings with computer models and cel-shading again. Similarly, that new Guilty Gear game is out this month, and also uses 3d models instead of painted 2d ones.

I mention those last few games because I can’t help but feel disappointed. They would all have looked better if they utilized styles similar to my work, where you literally use hand-drawn sprites/cels in 3d environments.

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