Would you use UDK to make an indie game?

[schizoslayer]

Sorry, wasn't trying to snipe. What I should have said was that you should be using polygons (imo) if your entire presentation is based on nicely glowing lines. It would be easy to write a line draw routine that did all this using wide polygons with a blending texture over it, but not if the engine you bought into won't allow you to do so.

Wasn't trying to take a pop at your game generally, looks pretty nice tbh. (Despite the bloom not being consistent. )

That's ok it wasn't only aimed at you. I made the original post late at night and realized this morning that it looked like I was saying "Look how awesome my graphics are with UDK" when what I meant was "look at how my game exists at all!"

What you may be seeing as inconsistent bloom is probably a result of the image scaling and the fact that Unreal doesn't support Anti-aliasing without DX10 enabled (Which I will admit is it's biggest problem visually).

If you can point out a spot on the images where you think it's particularly bad then I'd have a better idea if it's due to the art or the engine.

[Reactor]

I've shipped 2 Unreal Engine 3 Games to date. Granted neither were made with UDK but there is no practical difference from my point of view as all the game logic was done in Unrealscript on the previous games.

Great, I was more curious than anything, but it's nice that when someone says it's easy finishing a game you know it's coming from a place of actually finishing something

On the portal thing: The 25% is charged on the money the portal sends you. This was a big issue a few months ago and has since been clarified.

That's good.

[Nexic]

If your business model is dependent on spending 75% of your revenue from a sale on marketing then your business model is not compatible with using UDK.

So, a UDK game:

- Loses sales due to high hardware requirements
- Loses sales due to only single platform deployment
- Loses sales due to lack of potential web demo
- Loses sales due to 25% fee
- Loses sales since it cant advertise, at all

Basically, your only hope with a UDK game is to send it over to Steam and keep your fingers crossed. If that fails you're screwed.

Sounds like an awesome business model.

[Jack Norton]

I can't say whether it's better than Unity as I gave up on Unity after about ten minutes but I can say that it's alot easier than making an engine from scratch if that isn't something you're interested in.

I do have an advantage though. I've been working professionally with the Unreal engine for nearly 10 years now. Your mileage may vary.

I think that's your "problem". I mean, you gave unity 10 minutes before dismissing it. I think you didn't evaluate it properly. I perfectly understand you though: if I know well a system, is hard to change (like now I hate any language that's not python).
But I think nexic has some very valid points. If steam doesn't accept your game (and it can happen)... what's next ?

[Bad Sector]

Nice game, although personally i liked more the solid 3D look of the previous tests than the overdone 2D line-glowy style you have now :-).

- Loses sales due to 25% fee
- Loses sales since it cant advertise, at all

How did you reached to these two conclusions? Who forbid you to advertise? And how can you lose sales when you give 25% of what you would get to Epic?

[schizoslayer]

Nice game, although personally i liked more the solid 3D look of the previous tests than the overdone 2D line-glowy style you have now :-).

It's largely an art style chosen out of necessity as I can't afford custom art so I'm playing to my strengths which is doing particle effects

[Nexic]

How did you reached to these two conclusions? Who forbid you to advertise? And how can you lose sales when you give 25% of what you would get to Epic?

Because the profit margin on advertising for games is usually in the < 25% range. And because if someone is taking 25% of your revenue you are effectively losing 25% of your sales.

[Mac]

I'm not (yet) developing a game with UDK.

I mostly agree with the comments made so far.
But if you're really going for a 3D Game, there aren't many engines that are better. I'm not saying that because of visuals. You can get stunning results with UDK. But you can with most engines as long as you are or you have a good artist.
But systems like Matinee and especialy Kismet are awesome. I don't know any other engine that beats unreal in that area.

[Adrian Lopez]

Your mistake is thinking I was lauding how good the game looked or that it is somehow only possible to achieve with the Unreal Engine. It isn't. My point is that the game exists at all and has only taken me 1-2 weekends a month for ~4 months to get from this ... To this

I think your 10 years experience with Unreal Engine might have something to do with that. Others might have the same experience with UDK as you did with Unity, for there's always a learning curve regardless of which engine you pick. What concerns me is which is easiest to get started with for a person who knows very little about either engine.

[schizoslayer]

I think your 10 years experience with Unreal Engine might have something to do with that. Others might have the same experience with UDK as you did with Unity, for there's always a learning curve regardless of which engine you pick. What concerns me is which is easiest to get started with for a person who knows very little about either engine.

True I have an advantage and unfortunately I can never approach an engine from the point of view required.

However since the UDK was released last year some very cool things have appeared and not all of them are being made by Unreal veterans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErnmP5yjtfo

[Reactor]

However since the UDK was released last year some very cool things have appeared and not all of them are being made by Unreal veterans.

Not to argue the point, but I'd be interested to know how many of the non-veterans were behind the games in that video which looked like Unreal mods (which was almost all of them). In most middleware packages pulling off an fps is regarded as the holy grail. In UDK, the holy grail is making a game that doesn't look like a slightly modded fps.

[motorsep]

Let's say you make first $100k on Steam. Valve will take 30% of that. So you are going to be left with $70k (note I don't take into consideration VAT and refunds). 50k is yours, from 20k Epic takes out 25% and you end up with $65k. Now, you have a team of 3 and you have equal split. You get $21,666. That's not whole a lot, considering you have to pay tax on that amount. Even for a single individual it's not a lot of money, especially if that will be all you make in 1 year.

So if your game is picked up by press and is a hit (even on the small scale), then maybe it's worth using UDK (or if you are a sole developer).

Now you are done with your game and want to make DLC for it. Guess what, you still have to pay 25% and you no longer have 50k Epic doesn't "tax". And if your game exhausted sales? What are you left with?

Another thing to consider is that you can't fix engine bugs. If you hit a wall during development, you will have to wait until Epic fixes it. And they won't fix it just for you as they have a schedule and bug fixes trickle down from UE3 to UDK. What if you are not a big dev and Epic won't fix your bug? You will find yourself in a very bad place.

Oh, and so much for going cross-platform.

I like UDK for its tools and performance. However, I find the licensing terms not suitable for us currently (maybe eventually, when my company is recognized across the industry).

That being said, you gotta weight on pros and cons and based on that make your choice. Writing engine from scratch for a 3D game is nonsense when it comes to small indies (unless you have stable day job and poking around with game dev on the side).

Either way, we are using idTech 4 GPL.