Epic announced a new Unreal Tournament, using Unreal Engine 4, a couple of months back, and the studio has even shown off the very first match – though one without any bells, whistles or art.
Now some concept art is being shown off, but it’s not from Epic. When the game was first announced, Epic said it would be a collaborative process, and this concept art comes from the community.
Art director Chris Perna and senior environment artist Rick Kohler take a look at the submissions, offering critique on the Unreal Tournament live stream. You can hear the recording of their discussion on the blog.
Senior designer Jim Brown and head of the user experience team, Celia Hodent – who is also a cognitive psychologist – discuss a recent user experience test, sharing the results.
Surprisingly, most of the discussion of the use of colour comes from Hodent and Brown’s chat. UT traditionally has a red versus blue team setup, but red tends to reflect danger, and represents enemies in many games. Hodent says that it might be better to have the enemy always viewed as the red team, so whoever you are fighting is red.
It’s interesting to hear them flesh this sort of thing out, showing that Epic is sticking to its promise of making UT’s development transparent.