The technology behind some of the most popular video games, including Gears of War 3 and Infinity Blade, is now available to iPhone and iPad game developers, as Epic Games has released an updated version of its Unreal Development Kit (UDK).
The kit, which is free to download, provides developers the framework to create 3D simulations, high-quality graphics, and advanced animations on iOS. There is no cost for licensing the UDK for educational or non-commercial usage. If you do want to sell the apps you make with the kit, there’s a $99 licensing fee and you’ll have to pay 25% in royalties after your first $5000 in sales.
That could end up being quite a bit of money if you build a successful game, true, but making the kit free available will likely spur not just the development process for a gaming company, but also help expand the number of high-end video games that are starting to appear on Apple’s mobile devices.
Paving the Way for More High-End Games on Mobile Devices
Epic Games’ Infinity Blade hit the App Store last week and was quickly crowned the fastest grossing app ever. And while some game makers and players have long scoffed at the thought of high-quality games ever being available – or more importantly playable – on mobile devices, Infinity Blade demonstrates that, indeed, you can unleash some furious video-game ass-kicking via your iPhone.
As a Wall Street Journal article on today’s release notes, Apple has added a number of technologies over the last few years to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch that have made this sort of gaming experience possible. And it’s also featured mobile gaming as part of its marketing campaign, with Epic Citadel – also built with the Unreal Engine technology – featured at Apple’s iOS 4.1 announcement in September.
So what about Android? Game developers have a number of concerns with the Android platform, as “the wide variety of Android phones available on the market makes writing applications that can work across the board challenging, and Google’s Android Marketplace doesn’t allow for applications above a certain file size, a definite problem for both Infinity Blade.” But accordin to Epic Games co-founder Mark Rein says he expects Google will address that in the future, particularly as mobile game development grows.
