Stuff for Geeks

This is the news that rocked the indie game development world.  The Unreal DK is now free for non-commercial development and requires a 25% royalty on sales above $5000.  Sure, it’s steep, especially on top of publisher and distribution costs (you can easily come out with less than 50%) but you have to admit having access to the Unreal Engine for standalone games is amazing!  Just to be clear though, this isn’t quite the full license that big game developers get for a large upfront fee.  There is no source code, so you’re stuck with whatever you can do with UnrealScript (which is a heck of a lot if you look at the samples).

So, how does this affect the other indie engines (Torque 3D, C4 and Unity3D are my favourites)?  Quite honestly, I don’t know.  The three engines I mentioned all charge upfront for their top end engines (Unity is free, but the pro version costs $1500).  C4 is $350 for a single professional seat and includes source code.  Torque 3D is $1000 (there are discounts if you own the previous engine, TGEA) and also includes source.  On the surface UDK looks harder to get into, but the no upfront cost factor is compelling for hobbiest or cash strapped indies who spent all their money on Autodesk products.  On the other hand, shelling out $350 for C4 (a little more difficult since you need to do a fair bit of C++ coding) or $1000 for Torque 3D without having to hand over 25% of your profit later is maybe a bit better, if you can afford the upfront cost.  The other engines are also geared towards the indie developer and are quite easy to use.  UDK is also Windows only, while the other engines target multiple platforms.

So, where does that leave me?  I like them all, but I was blown away by the UDK samples (literally too, I got shot to pieces), so I’m going to invest some time hunting down UDK documentation and tutorials and give the engine a run to see what I can come up with (as I will with C4 v2 and T3D v1.1).  Stay tuned, I may even post the odd tutorial or two!

written by Paul \\ tags: Games, UnrealDK