Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, there is the license cost; giving 25 percent of the revenues to Epic in case
your sales go well means that compared to other available engines, UDK costs a lot
more.
That said, if you are ready to put time and effort in the learning process, UDK grants
the possibility of creating high-end games, which clearly stand out from the mass
of titles available for any platform. Many teams, even small indie ones, succeeded
in developing well-crafted games and made a name for themselves, thanks to this
wonderful tool. Whatever the engine you put your hands on when you begin your ad-
venture in the industry of game development, UDK is the point you should arrive at,
sooner or later.
Educational engines
In the last section dedicated to game engines, we will describe two engines that are
particularly fit for educational purposes, due to a very friendly visual interface. Des-
pite the fact that some nice games have been created with such tools, no true pro-
fessional would recommend them, these are software for beginners who can use
them to understand what a game engine is and how to create a complete game from
scratch.
GameMaker
GameMaker is a very interesting game engine developed by
Mark Overmars
and
published by YoYoGames. Its main feature is that it allows to quickly create 2D
games without any need to write anything. The interface offers the possibility to
define the behavior of game objects (as the actors of your game are called) by a
simple procedure based on events (such as creation of the game object, collisions
occurring with other objects, or mouse- and keyboard-related actions) and then
choosing the actions that must take place when those events occur. The action list
provides all the basic things you can expect to happen in a game, such as moving
actions, modification to gravity or vertical speed of game objects, destruction or cre-
ation of game objects, or drawing score, available lives, or health bars on the screen.
It also allows users to perform basic logic and mathematics checks, such as whether
a collision occurs, if a position in the world is free, or whether a certain expression is
true or false.
