My brother Mat Broome (art director on DC Universe Online, Planetside 2, H1Z1) and his business partner Kevin McPherson (programmer on EverQuest 1 & 2, Planetside 1 & 2) have formed an indie development studio named Hero Machine Studios. After trying several engines out they quickly settled on Unreal Engine, and have been working in it for the last year+ creating their first game. I thought it would be interesting to document their process here as a sort of dev blog since their setup is so unique.
Mat is doing all the art from 2d to 3d (including retop, texturing, etc.) and Kevin is doing all the code. The ease of learning blueprinting and other features of Unreal have made their process much easier than it would have been otherwise. Their goal is to prove that a very small team can make games with legitimate AAA quality using tools like Unreal Engine.
Kinetik is a RPG tactical shooter, so it takes advantage of all of the best UE features like blueprints. Will post gameplay footage soon. First some shots of one of the game’s NPCs:
This is one of the drones you’ll have the ability to deploy and control, the AI is being developed such that the companion class acts as useful assistants to you and your team while you fight rather than simply running alongside. Different upgrade paths will complement different playing styles. A key facet to the game is the ability to command the companions rather than releasing them and waiting to see how they respond to battle conditions.
This is one of the game models of characters you’ll be playing as in KINETIK. It’s a tactical RPG shooter, so you level your gear, your drone (shown above) etc. through looting in missions. Everything is near-future so Mat is going for a very tactile aesthetic where things feel familiar for people who play modern shooters while still having freshness to it.
A big advantage to working in Unreal is how good the blueprinting system is, because it makes developing the RPG elements faster for a programmer like Kevin who’s used to more cumbersome game engines. This is how 2 people have gotten so much done. Gameplay footage coming as soon as I’m allowed to share (very fun to play already).
Huge thanks to Unreal for the development grant! This will be a big help in KINETIK’s continued development. We’re making progress on command systems among other things currently.
As promised we’ve uploaded our base blueprint for exploding meshes HERE. It offers a bit more flexibility than some exploding mesh blueprints in that it works in conjunction with Multiplayer gameplay.
New gameplay footage is up on our youtube channel, we’ve spent the last several months focusing on a lot of the meta game moments including the crafting systems, command wheel integration (lots more on that in the next several weeks), cover mechanics, and AI behavior. We’ll be uploading more of our multiplayer Blueprints for free in the coming weeks as well in addition to our previous destructible mesh BP.
New blog entry in our making the game series, on how to bring a character to life by focusing first on the eyes and then expanding outward. Goes into some key differences between game art and other disciplines as well as some concepts that are universal.
Our new gameplay trailer is up, we’ve made a lot of progress on game systems including getting inventory and crafting working reliably across Steam w/ multiple game modes.
This trailer shows off some of the things we’re taking advantage of in Unreal Engine 4 like the flexibility of UMG widgets and the ability to customize a lot of spawning options via blueprints
