Thought I would share in this forum what Shield Break Studios has been working on with UE4, Bierzerkers. This will be playable in Epic’s Unreal Engine booth at PAX this week, so if you’re there please come by and say hi!
We did a live stream of us playing the game and it’s archived on YouTube :
About Development and using UE4:
We have seven full time developers that are working in the engine, and have been working on this since mid to late September of last year.
Team:
1 full time animator
1 full time programmer
1 programmer/business person
1 producer/designer (BPs)
1 full time designer (levels and BPs)
2 full time 3d artists (one doing characters one doing environments)
1 full time business guy
We do most of the programming type work in blueprints, but also a bit and there in code. The UI in that video isn’t quite final for what we’re showing at PAX, but we are using Coherent for the more complex elements. We use Trello for project management, and Google’s tools for collaboration (we all work from home).
The demo is 2v2 but we’ve had playtests in large maps with up to 16v16. We haven’t quite landed on what our final target player count in maps will be, but it’s definitely more design driven than tech driven as we know the tech can handle large numbers.
I’m probably leaving out lots of stuff you might have questions about so fire away! It’s awesome to see what people have been working on in and I try to visit the forums everyday to see what people are posting.
If you’d like to know more or stay up to speed on development follow us on twitter @Shield_Break
Hi Skytram, nice to see you on the forums! I’ve seen your first Twitch with a couple of friends and we think the style is wonderful!
Nice to see you got to this level working from home, it can be difficult.
One point of criticism we noticed during the stream is that the “heavy”'s animations are more sluggish/lagging than “big” / heavy. By that I mean it feels like there is a disconnect between motion and (walking) animation which made it feel odd. The shield class did not suffer this problem.
Good stuff guys, I was also watching the stream and I’m very jealous of you guys! It’s awesome how you got a team going like that. I hope I can persuade my friends to also join me
We’re finally recovering from PAX and very pleased to report that players loved the game! We really appreciate the support we got in this thread as well.
We’re going to make a concerted effort moving forward to regularly stream us playing and game with some twitch/youtube streamers we know and talk about development, what we’re working on, etc.
If you’d like to stay posted the best way to do so is following us on twitter @shield_break - we’re working on getting a more robust site up at www.shieldbreak.com but making websites is hard and we’re trying to focus on the game…
I’ll also do my best to post on these forums when we have stuff like this happening because I’m sure the UE4 development community would appreciate hearing about what we’re doing with the engine and have the hard hitting dev questions as well.
Thanks for checking it out and keep posting awesome stuff !