Game On!

Have you ever noticed that there are times when you make a decision that you’re unsure of, and then a bizarre chain of events unfold around you that make you think “this was meant to be!”?

Well it just so happens that we’re thinking that right now.

In the past Broadening Horizons have produced maps, sprites, texture maps, models and code for use in various games over the years, and we’ve always had a keen interest in 3D animation, design and of course games, so when the opportunity arose to get back into the gaming world we thought, what the heck.

Having previously played around with GameStudio’s A6 engine, and having worked in C & C+ many many years ago, when a general enquiry turned into the opportunity for a full time degree course we thought, “are we doing the right thing getting back into this? Should we be dedicating time to developing the games side further when there are so many companies out there like Ubisoft, Midway, Rockstar, Epic etc. who all have their own defined engine they’ve developed to create games that sell by the millions”, but out of general curiousity and a thirst for knowledge we decided, yes, we should, who knows, even if we didn’t get fully into creating our own products we may be called upon to help a company develop a programme or game again, and so, the ball was set in motion.

During a general staff / client discussion we were asked the question, if you’re working with the A7 engine or coding from scratch in C++, would you have to go to work for Epic or Ubisoft to get to use a developed 3D environment like the Unreal, Quake or Cry engines or could you pay for the rights to use them, to which at the time we weren’t really sure, but low and behold, a startling coincidence happened.

Epic released the Unreal Engine as a Developers Kit, free to download for none commercial purposes. Not only that, but it also gives a detailed description of how the licensing and royalties work if you do actually use it to develop commercial products.

So it’s time to dust off the old case of coding manuals and discs with all our old programmes, models, maps and graphics, refresh our memories of what we used to get up to in the early days and see what the future holds in store for us.

Hopefully, we can say “watch this space” but we’ll give it a few months until we get back up to speed and start working on something of interest, but we can definitely say that the future’s looking pretty interesting.