So I’ve been spending my time learning Unity while playing with my engine’s code, until I met a friend of mine. My friend Hamad has been playing with Unreal Development Kit (UDK) for a quite while now, and I’m – as a Bahraini – very proud of what he’s accomplished. He spent a couple of years with the engine and he now knows to how to get his work done by now.
He did some good marketing on me for the UDK that I really couldn’t resist, I went back home and directly downloaded the latest version of the engine, and started gathering as many documents and videos about the engine that I could put my hands on. He completely convinced me to use it as my main development platform, and I honestly can’t agree more, the licensing policy, cross platform and the huge documentation library in all its forms are just enough for me. Back in 2009 when I used UDK for the first time it was very different, the documentation and community were very hard to grasp, but now everything has changed. I got access to many books on the same subject that I’m interested in.
UDK is huge, you have several tools in it. Unreal Cascade, Unreal Matinee, UnrealEd, Kismet and many others that are there for your convenience. But does that mean you as a programmer have nothing to contribute to the whole process? Well not really, you can join in. UnrealScript is UDK’s scripting language and with it you can do so much, you’ll be able to apply the knowledge of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) to your scripts and game.
I just spent a week doing hardcore UDK revising, I’ll keep you updated with my latest news with UDK.
PS. Pay Hamad’s team a visit on their website (http://www.actionmobilegames.com), they’re releasing a decent game for the iPhone platform with the name “2013: Infected Wars“.