Train2Game & Epic Games gave Train2Game student teams the opportunity to win one of four places
at The Gadget Show Live 2012and compete for the chance to walk away with a fully licence Unreal
Development Kit.Epic
’
s European Territory Manager Mike Gamble was one of the game jam judges, and theTrain2Game blog managed to grab him for a chat. In this extensive interview, Gamble talks about Epic
’
’
s blog about the Train2Game & Epic Game Jam over at Unreal Insider .
We’re here at the Train2Game & Epic Game Jam, can you tell us a bit about Epics involvement
with the event?
We’ve been talking with Train2Game about using UDK in their curriculum, as a quite separate item
talking about a game jam at The Gadget Show Live and so a natural point of choosing the teams wasto be involved in the game jam here.
Tell us about the prize that’s up for grabs at Make Something Unreal Live at The Gadget Show.
There’s a commercial Unreal
iOS license up for grabs for the winning team, which essentially means
it’s a source code license rather than binary which will allow the winning team to create a game for
commercial distribution.
So why do Epic want to get involved with Train2Game and get UDK in the course?
In a purely non philanthropic manner, the more people that use UDK, the more people who arefamiliar with our tools, the better they are to go into the industry where our engine is prettyubiquitous.
Can you tell us a bit about the UDK engine which is available for free to anyone to use?
.It’s completely free, you only have to pay anything whenyou actually commercialise your output, at which point you’d pay us $99 a
nd then a 25% royalty
after you’ve collected $50,000.
So basically, if you’ve built yourself a little app, a little game, or
whatever really using the technology, on PC, or iOS or Mac, you can put it out there on Steam or theiTunes App Store and make a little bit of cash off it.
So it’s been quite successful for teams doing that then?
Yeah, it’s been very successful, we’ve had some cracking titles, quite surprisingly professional let’ssay, and there’s some decent money to be made. But often what we find i
s a development team will
start using UDK, and then by the time they’ve finished the project, they decide to swap over to a
commercial UE3 license and we have a path for them to do that and some of them have beenincredibly successful.
So what are the benefits for Train2Game students of taking parts in events like this, theTrain2Game & Epic Game Jam?
Well I think it gives them a real crash course in UDK, it gives them a crash course in gamesdevelopment, it also gives them a crash course in teamwork among
people they don’t know in teams
selected for them, which was definitely useful for preparing them for going into the jobs market.And ultimately the benefit for the winners is they go onto The Gadget Show Live and I thinkeveryone who competes there, whether they win or not, stands a very good chance of getting intothe industry in a professional manner.
At the time of recording we’re pre
-judging, what will you be looking for in the winning games?
Obviously we’re not looking for finished
, polished, Triple A sellable games, that would be ridiculous.
We’re really looking at a number of criteria: adherence to the theme we’ve set, completeness of thegame insofar as the limits to what they can do in this time. But something that’s small and polished
and works
is preferable to something that’s huge rambling and buggy. We’re looking for theprofessionalism of the teams, we’re looking for the quality of the games. There are about 6 or 7parameters we’re scoring out of a hundred in total.
And for everyone involved
it’s good that they have a finished product they can show potential
employers?
Exactly! Perhaps the most important thing any student can do for themselves is build a portfolio of
work. It’s all very well being qualified, but at the end of the day you have
to differentiate yourself
from every other qualified person, and if you’ve got a kick arse portfolio that’s really going to help.
A little bit about you now, tell us about your role at Epic.
I manage Europe, for Epic, on the technology and licensing front. That means I promote and sellUnreal Engine 3 licenses to developers big and small.
Earlier this year we saw Unreal’s ‘Samaritan’ tech demo, what was the thinking behind producing
that? Does it show the future of the industry?
It shows a future. For us it was...well, we’ve called it our love letter to the hardware manufacturers.It shows what can be done with a level of hardware. It was built using PC Direct X 11 hardware that’s
available off the shelf today, and it w
as us saying ‘Look, if you built this into the next generation of
consoles, this is what we could do.
Obviously we can’t say ‘You must do this,’,
and the hardware
manufacturers haven’t hold us what they’re doing, but it was for us to stimulate some thinki
ngabout what might be possible.
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Train2Game & Epic Game Jam Interview with Epic Games European Territory Manager Mike Gamble
Train2Game & Epic Games gave Train2Game student teams the opportunity to win one of four places at The Gadget Show Live 2012 and compete for the chance to walk away with a fully licence Unreal Development…
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