Starting out!

Hi, I’m Fred and this is the part that everyone skips!

I’m going to be honest with you! I’m not a professional programmer. Actually before I tried to write my first game with UnrealScript my total number of lines written in any language combined was below 500.

Also I get bored pretty quick! If I was reading this article I would close it by now! I’ve tried studying about 5 engines and SDKs before I got to UDK and gave up on all of them. Not because they were not powerful enough, just not that exciting!

But on the other hand I am self educated 3D Animator and CG artist and I know that even though studying process might be hard, it’s easier with every step you make! Also it’s very rewarding and fun! I mean what can be more fun than doing something you didn’t think you could, not so long ago! Doing something your friends think only Zuckerberg-like guys can do, makes you feel like you just discovered a super-power! (at least if you’re as geeky as I am)

While I’ve been studying UDK+UnrealScript the lack of information shocked me! It was almost driving me crazy how much info there is about how to setup lighting and animate camera and how little there was about actually programming a game within it. And even the small amount of information that you would find about UnrealScript itself was about modifying code that was already written for Unreal Tournament (which is included into UDK code). That is more like learning editing properties within a text editor then actually developing the unique game you have on your mind. 

So what are we doing here!?

In schools they don’t actually (read: hopefully) teach you just knowledge, they teach you how to work with information. What I’ll be trying to achieve is not to explain you how I write a particular game, but how to bring any game idea of yours to life!

We’re gonna be building fully functional games from scratch here! We’ll be studying how UDK and UnrealScript work and are organized. We’ll cover some basic math and algorithms where necessary. We’ll learn how to quickly build simple games as well as how to develope a feature heavy ones.

How we are gonna roll!

We’re going to have at two major categories for the start! Quick Game and Big Project!

Quick Game - will be all about a game that can be written within less than 16 work hours. And I stress the word “written”! Creation of graphics is not included. We’ll do a separate category for this later. Once there are people who read these stuff, we will decide together what game we’ll be writing! These posts will be out on Mondays.

Big Project - will be about creation of a much bigger game! The one that takes couple of guys working for half a year at least. Actually it is going to be similar to the one my team is developing for a year now. These will be out on Fridays!

We will be working together! I mostly create graphics myself, but I understand that a lot of people who would like to learn how to program games, might not have the skill. So I’ll give you guys all the graphics I’m gonna be using, unless it’s the graphics created for some other project. But I’ll mostly try to have stuff exclusively created for the blog.

I’ll be making both blog posts and videos! Even though I might be covering similar topics in text and video, but they are gonna be far from identical! SO you can read! You can watch! But you better do both!

So well yeah... I guess that’s enough for an intro! I’ll see you guys on Monday!

Good hunting!