Viewing Post from Monday May 04, 2009
North Carolina State University Students Use UE3 To Develop Edutainment Games
And now for a story slightly off the beaten path. A team at North Carolina State University is using Unreal Engine 3 to edutainment games.
The game details efforts to salvage the Queen Anne's Revenge, thought to be the flagship of the famous pirate Blackbeard. Players work as divers and scientists uncovering artifacts. Each time a player recovers a cannon, barrel or door, he or she rockets back to the early 1700s and defends the Queen Anne's Revenge against another ship trying to steal the precious booty.
"It took an entire month to figure out what we wanted to do," Overton said.
[...]
Designing a game from scratch would have taken years; even professionals don't do it that way. Part of the team's assignment was to use a game engine called Unreal Tournament 3, a product of Epic Games, based in Cary, to create their own games.
But Unreal doesn't have a manual or a cheat sheet. It took a month for the NCSU students to learn Unreal's tricks, secrets and foibles, then the rest of the time to learn to pump up, undo, and jerry-rig them to suit their games. By the end, they were putting in 40-hour weeks.