Interview with the Black Wing Foundation about Unreal Engine
A little over a week ago, Epic Games released an updated version of its engine – Unreal 4.3. In connection with this release, we interviewed Alexey Savchenko, founder and executive producer of the Black Wing Foundation studio, which develops mobile and PC projects based on Epic technology.
Alexey Savchenko
Two years ago, not all game developers could afford Unreal. Today it is available even for students. But how attractive is it for mobile game developers? How can he interest them?
Hello everyone In fact, those very two years ago, the whole situation around Unreal Engine in the local industry was much mythologized, primarily, of course, because of the well-deserved reputation of a large and expensive engine from the retail sector of the industry.
We have been working with the technology for about five years now. And from our point of view, Epic Games has always been an open company, always taking into account the capabilities of the second party. It seems to me that many simply did not try to discuss the possibility of licensing, deciding that "it's already clear, everything is expensive, and nothing will work at all."
Anyway, the situation has changed radically since then: today Unreal has become available to everyone.
For indie teams, the engine is attractive because it can be used to make a game with extremely limited resources.
For example, using the standard functionality of the engine and standard templates, a novice team can build gameplay with minimal programmer participation (exclusively on Kismet/Blueprint scripts). If we talk about large studios, then by improving the existing functionality, you can do something big and cool.
From the point of view of mobile development, the main misconception is that the technology is too heavy for this sector of the market. This is not the case, although, of course, there are certain specifics and demands on pre-production.
In fear i trust
Yes, from the very beginning it is necessary to conduct a lot of tests, calculate capacities, measure the consumption of the production budget for landfills, particulars and postprocesses. Yes, you need to plan the design and level design in advance and correctly, take into account the specifics of the mobile development branch.
Development "on a whim", with gross violations of the recommendations of the pipeline technology and the disorderly development of design and content, is likely to end sadly, but this is primarily a matter of development culture, and if it is bad, then any process using any tools becomes overgrown with problems.
By the way, we have experience in developing two full-fledged, complex midcore projects under contract, completed in less than six months.
There are many other offers on the market now, there is Unity, there is Cocos, what can Unreal offer to mobile users that they cannot?
The main question here is what tasks development sets, but, in general, Unreal Engine is the kind of thing that tells you: look, here's technological superiority for you, the most complete set of tools, accumulated on a huge number of projects, do not think about anything superfluous, make a game.
The emphasis is on the fact that:
- To enable the developer to minimize the size of the team and, accordingly, the costs;
- to give the most complete and convenient toolset to designers, level designers and artists;
- implement all changes through the internal environment of the engine with minimal involvement of external solutions.
Along with the technology, a huge number of genre templates, locations, and examples are also supplied.
The subscription model presented in the fourth version of the technology is a crusade for the right of every enthusiast to sit down at his computer and be able to make the game he wants to make.
Unreal Engine is a multiplatform technology that allows you to quickly and easily "drive" games between iOS, Mac, Android, PC, HTML5 and consoles, if the project is potentially interesting to these different audiences. In the case of growing companies, the technology structure is extremely conducive to the proper scaling of development, staff, and development teams. These are fast staff training, very fast build iterations, fast feedbacks and the ability to adjust the direction of development. From the point of view of approaches, which is especially important in the case of mobile platforms, this is the possibility of correctly combining conservative and relatively new technological solutions in order to achieve maximum game quality. In recent updates, Unreal has introduced tools for developing 2D games, which is a good step forward and to meet mobile platforms.
Chaos Domain
Comparing with other technologies, honestly, it's hard for me to correctly draw analogies with Cocos, it's still completely different, Unity is a competitor on mobile platforms, but the current strategy of Epic is such that it's hard for me to make any arguments in favor of the latter, which I would have had six months ago. Probably, each technology is good in its own way. And Unreal, specifically in our case, is just a very good tool.
A huge update for Unreal was released the other day. Would you like to share which features and why you were most impressed/pleased with this update?
Oh, there's just so much that's like in the joke about "everything is so delicious." We are currently developing several projects on Unreal Engine 3.0 and plan to upgrade to 4.3 by the end of the year, early 2015, but from what we have dug up for the projects we have planned, the most interesting are:
- A serious update of the render;
- Timely support for the latest Xcode;
- Metal API Support.
In particular, we are extremely interested in
- Oculus Rift Upgrade — we are actively exploring this side now;
- Innovations in AI came in handy for one of the projects in development;
- Support for SpeedTree 7.
In addition to the above, there are about 500 edits per update.
In conclusion, I would like to note that the level of support and technology development is generally growing by leaps and bounds. Epic Games has big plans, which means that many developers with these big plans have high hopes. And that's good!
