It’s rare for developer diaries to really show you how the sausage is made, but Unreal Tournament proves the exception to the rule. Where usually our curiosity as sated only by a lead offering generalised platitudes to someone just off camera while the monitor behind him shows a wireframe of… something, here senior level designer Sidney Rauchberger offers a bit more insight into what happens when the art team hands back a CTF map to the designers.
We see your trigger finger itching, and we don’t want no trouble. Head over to our best PC shooters, and we won’t squeal on you.
How many of us have ever stopped and truly looked around a multiplayer FPS map to admire its architectural complexity and artistic splendour? None of us who care about k:d, that’s for sure. That’s what the above making of video is for. No one’s lining up a headshot on you while Rauchberger tells you about retaining clean collision surfaces on walls for better wall-running. There’s no Redeemer barrelling towards you as art director Chris Perna informs of of the Titan Pass map’s long history of various stone and metal-based materials.
As someone whose level design experience extends as far as ‘a room with a light in it’ in Source SDK, I find little insights like this genuinely interesting. More of this sort of thing, please, game devs.
Unreal Tournament’s still in pre-alpha, but you can download the current WIP build by popping over to the official site. You’ll need to register for an Epic Games account to do so, though.
Various incarnations of the pre-alpha build have been available for download since August 2014, and Epic are taking a semi-crowd-sourcing approach to development. Talented Unreal Engine devs around the world are helping the game take shape, and new player-created maps pop up regularly.
Most recently, UT celebrated Halloween with a spooky variant of its Facing Worlds map and some seasonal masks.