LittleB and I were playing with the Unreal Development Kit this weekend. Well, more so LittleB, but I did come up with a small level. My focus was more on learning how to get 3d models from 3ds Max in to the UDK3 game engine. It’s fairly straight forward, I put a simple sign in the game with the Mad Violinist picture on it. You can shoot it, which I’m sure will bring pleasure to many! I hardly ever play computer games, but seeing a 3ds Max object I made go into a game engine was a big thrill!

I’ll back up a bit and explain what this is about, for people who aren’t with me. Many of the top video games on the market have been created using a game engine called Unreal Development Kit. This engine is software for creating game level environments, characters and weapons etc. This game engine is free to download, and anyone can learn how to create games with it. If you want to sell a game, then you have to pay $99 to Epic Games, and after you have earned $5000 revenue from it, you must pay 25% of your total revenue after that. Not profit! Revenue! Which means after advertising costs and other marketing expenses, you earn very little. Hey, you can at least know you can keep $4901! ($5000-$99) Making games and not selling them costs $0.

Objects created in 3d programs such as 3Ds Max and Maya can be imported into the game engine as assets (objects) that can be seen in the environment. To test this I made a simple sign with my photo on it. In the game you can walk around it and shoot it. It has collision properties, which simply means that you can’t walk through it. You have to walk around it. Now that I know how to import an object like this, the sky is the limit as far as what kind of environment I could make. The object can be made in 3Ds Max, and the texture made in Photoshop.

For my game, I created a simple room. It has the sign in it. When the game starts, you find yourself in the room with this sign. After you click the fire button on your mouse (left button) the game starts. Bots will join the game from 2 different spawn sites that I set. The number of bots that join at any one time depends on how many you specify in the options before you start the game.

The navigation is done using the standard game controllers. The W key moves you forward, S moves you back, the A key moves you left, the D key moves you right. You look around with your mouse, left mouse button fires, right mouse button fires a special kind of shot. Space bar is for jumping, C for crouching. Standard buttons.

If you have a Windows computer, you can download my game here: [LINK] (117mb)

Just unzip the install .exe, install it and allow it to set up the game. When you don’t want it anymore, go to the Windows control panel, and remove the program in the same way as you remove any other program.

LittleB put more effort into her game, as she created a few rooms, and an outside area too, so she had to add a sky. The walls and floor have materials applied from the UDK3 library, so they are not custom textures. Since LittleB has a few rooms, she had to add some simple paths to guide the bots from room to room to seek out the player and kill them. Otherwise they’d be stuck in one room.

Bots don’t automatically spawn at the start of the game.

If you want bots to kill, press the tab key and type: addbots 1
Then press enter.

You can change “1″ to any number of bots. Make sure there is a space between addbots and the number.

Here is a screen grab of LittleB’s level, but there are other rooms with different decoration:

You can download her game from here: Rooms [LINK] (132mb)

If you try them out, let us know what you think!