Unreal University

The 14th of July: “Bastille Day” in France – a day spent in celebration of the storming of the Bastille fortress over 200 years ago, which was an important landmark in the history of the French revolution. Here in the present day,  there was another landmark: one for Epic Games. For the first time in Europe, they were running a one day event to teach newcomers all about the basics of the Unreal Development Kit, or UDK for short, and in a rather nice part of London too. Admission was a ticket-based affair and tickets were limited, but they were also free, so naturally they were getting snapped up lightning fast – luckily, I managed to bag myself one.

On the day, I’d arrived very comfortably early – the promise of free breakfast was too good to pass up, you see – and it wasn’t long until more people started piling in behind us. No doubt I wasn’t the only one enticed by the prospect of free breakfast, but then, the breakfast wasn’t exactly the main reason everyone was there (or was it?). After an hour or so of sitting around, ingesting pastry goodness and reading about Rayman: Origins‘ interesting development approach in a free magazine, we were allowed into the main conference room. Here, we were greeted by one Mike Gamble, the European Territory Manager at Epic Games, as well as a legion of desktop PCs – all primed for maximum UDK carnage. Carnage and learning, I might hastily add.

Attendees had plenty of time learning the basics of the UDK first hand.

After an enlightening 30 minute keynote speech from Mike that covered such subjects as the current usage and impact of UDK as well as what using the UDK can mean for you, James Tan, documentation contractor for Epic Games and Markus Arvidsson, the lead programmer at Teotl Studios – both of whom worked on the fantastic first-person puzzler The Ball, which was made using the UDK – took to the stage. What proceeded was an in-depth presentation that covered the main features of the UDK, which included UnrealMatinee for creating cutscenes, Kismet for scripting the more intangible elements of your games like activating checkpoints or enemy AI, and even the UnrealEditor itself, which allows you to sculpt quick levels for rapid prototyping or more detailed levels for later on in the development process.

At this point, it was clear that the Unreal University was intended for absolute beginners and in my mind, that was a very good thing. Before I’d even laid my hands on the UDK that day, any doubts I had or even just the general feelings that I was out of my depth by even being there were dispelled early on. You see, I’d tried to use the UDK previously, but I quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tools it offered and there didn’t seem to be any clear tutorials for beginners about getting started or learning about how to use the most fundamental tools of those that were available to you – but perhaps I was just looking in the wrong place.

I found using the UDK to be a daunting prospect before I attended the Unreal University.

So maybe having the most prominent features of the UDK described to you in detail didn’t give you a good enough idea of just what’s capable with it? Luckily, James had prepared a basic racing game, checkpoints et al, that can run on the iPad and didn’t take long to make, to further cement it’s capabilities. Well, it would have if more than a single person in the room had brought their iPad to try it out on – which, alas, was not me. Unfortunately, this was one part of the event that fell rather flat on it’s face, though not for want of trying. It was clear that James had thought that a brilliant way to showcase the possibilities of the UDK was to make a stand-alone game with it, and putting it on an iPad meant it would look and feel like a finished product, and not just some example game or other that came pre-packaged with the software. It was a good idea and hopefully everyone could appreciate the reasoning behind it, but perhaps having it run on the iOS without also having something for everyone sans iPad to try was a bit of an oversight.

At this point, we broke for lunch. I’d just like to point out it was very tasty and was also free – hopefully you’re now ridiculously jealous. Now back to the event!

After our lunch break, it was hands-on time. Up until now, the PCs that had been sitting in front of us hadn’t been seeing any action at all – there wasn’t a Facebook page in sight either, but that might have been due to the fact that none of the computers had internet access. Anyway, we were now going to be shown how to use the UDK for ourselves. First things first, James started off by showing us how to make a basic room that comprised of nothing more than a floor, a wall and window. While it’s not exactly something that would pass any building inspection in the real world – what with 3 of the exits to the room consisting of nothing but an unfathomable abyss – it was a good starting point none the less. We were led through such things as using the block brushes to choose the shape of the blocks we want to add, and then adding them in or “subtracting” their shape from a block already in place to create a new composite shape.

When everyone was happy that they knew how to harness the mighty, crackling energies contained within the block brushes, we moved on to how to add more detail to our levels. The next step was applying textures to the block surfaces – which was simply a matter of dragging a texture from the content browser and dropping into the UnrealEditor window, onto the surface you wanted to texture; there was nothing too difficult or challenging in this respect. Soon enough, we had moved on to applying decals. Decals were a very interesting part of the editor, purely because they didn’t work in the way I had imagined. What I thought to be the case was that a decal was a 2D image applied to a surface like painting a wall or slapping a poster up on it, but that wasn’t it at all. What is actually the case is that decals are 3D objects just like everything else, and the image is projected onto a surface. Say for instance, you want to apply some gravy blood splatter to the corner of a wall. By having the decals projected onto the corner rather than applied, you get a better effect of the blood splattering against the wall at an angle where merely applying it would just give you a flat image – one that would look neither realistic nor convincing.

For my first proper attempt, I think I did pretty well. Note the gravy(?) splattered across the wall, the shallow pool of water on the floor and the light emanating from above the door.

Moving on, we also learned how to use tools that many would possibly consider later on in the level development process – namely, adding light sources and bodies of water. These were much easier than I’d anticipated – making a new light source just involved placing one in the editor and moving it where you wanted. I had fun playing around with the light sources – when you add one and move it, it changes the shadows on everything around it in real time, so you can see what is lit and what isn’t as you go about making changes. Water effects were marginally trickier, and involved adding a layer along which to apply the water texture. Both of these combined made for some rather impressive looking rooms, at least for a beginner anyway.

After we’d all finished designing our structural masterpieces with the help of James and Markus, it was time to move on to learning about the UDK‘s Kismet feature in greater detail. Kismet is basically a scripting tool; it’s what allows you to deal with and control all the elements of your game that can’t be placed or sculpted – things like high scores, checkpoints, game menus and even enemy AI. We didn’t get to play around with this like we did with the Unreal Editor, but that may have been for the best. It looked like using Kismet for anything with any real complexity to it would take a fair while to implement – at least, that was going by the images James showed us of things he’d scripted in Kismet earlier.

We moved quickly on to a side-scrolling shooter that James had made using the UDK. In a similar vein to the racing game that he’d had made for the iPad, this side-scrolling shooter was made to showcase a relatively more comprehensive UDK-made game and one that focussed more on the use of Kismet and the other aspects we’d learned about so far. James ran us through how he’d used Kismet more heavily, which included things like having the enemy robots activate when they approached the player and started attacking them immediately afterwards, not to mention when you want cutscenes to trigger, or where your character respawns after a death. We got to play around with the shooter and see what happened when we triggered certain things within the game, but beyond that we didn’t do anything in the way of creating or editing our own side-scrolling shooters in this area.

A less complicated Kismet diagram – this partial one is for the side-scrolling shooter.

The last area that was covered was how to use the UDK‘s UnrealMatinee to make cutscenes and in-game cinematics. This was the second hands-on lesson of the day, with James starting off by showing us a cutscene he’d made using the software which, over the course of the next hour, we were going to recreate. For the most part, I picked this up quite quickly but I have a feeling that may have been partly due to some slight similarities between UnrealMatinee and other 3D animation rendering software I had used a year or two ago. Regardless, there were some areas that I felt could have been better explained in this aspect – there were times where I’d move an object, say for example a lift, upwards, but it wouldn’t move the contents of the lift unless you selected it correctly, which was just confusing. I also felt that James went a bit too quickly through his demonstration of how to add fade in and out effects when switching between cameras, but ultimately that may have been down to time constraints at this point in the day more than anything. That said, James and Markus gave more than enough time for questions – 15 minutes after every topic was devoted entirely to this as well as another hour at the very end of the day, but we were also free to fire questions their way mid-presentation – and they made sure to answer any and every question in as much detail as they could.

All in all, the Unreal University was well worth attending. For a free event, there was a lot on offer: demonstrations, detailed presentations, free food, Gears of War 3 mousemats for the best questions asked – the lot. If, like me, you were intimidated at the mere thought of even running UDK because you hadn’t a clue what to do next, or if the word “Kismet” scares you because it sounds too much like it could be a villain from Star Wars, then the Unreal University is right up your street. Unfortunately, it seems like Epic Games haven’t made public any plans to do this sort of thing again in the near future, and the event I attended was just for the one day. I would imagine that if the event was popular enough, which it was, and there was enough demand for more events like this one, that Epic Games would undoubtedly run more of them and maybe in more places too. In that respect, it’s all up to you, so if you’re interested, get to it!


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One response to “Unreal University”

  1. Giles avatar

    I was *this* close to getting a ticket, but chose to ask work if it was ok for me to go. By the time they said ‘of course you foolish fool’, twas too late, and all the tickets were gone dagnabbit!

    Still, I now know who can teach me a thing or two about the UDK. I eagerly anticipate trying out your first efforts Mr P! ^_^

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