2014 has been going on for a few months now and we would like to share a little update with you. Last december our plan looked like we were really close to show some video footage, hooking up the main menu and getting an alpha version rolling out. Only a couple of days later we had the chance to get in contact with Epic Games and got an invitation into the exclusive circle of UnrealEngine4 beta testers. Without a doubt we were extremely excited about that, but still we tried to keep a cool head and make a reasonable decision about whether we should port Barrage to a new engine or not.
Main menu in UnrealEngine4
A framework like the UnrealEngine4 opens up an incredible amount of new possibilities but is it worth to basically start from scratch again? At the end of the day the temptation to work with the latest and best technology in game development available right now was too big for us to resist. So instead of working on a solid alpha version, we started from the very beginning in January. The experience of working with UDK for the first 18 months of Barrage development did not go to waste, we were back in business in no time.
A missile on the fly
As matters stand now, we re-imported all assets and built the new PBR shaders. Similar to UDK we had to create our own UI framework that allows us to implement all the features we need for a game like Barrage which took the lion's share of our time lately. With that mostly finished we are now about to continue with the gameplay programming and hope to show you plenty more Barrage ingame screenshots and videos in a new shiny UE4 look soon™!
So how long did it take you to get back to where you had been after 18 months in the previous engine? Are you there yet in UE4?
Hey James,
no, we are not there just yet and it's a bit hard to predict because we aren't working on it fulltime for most of the time.
I would hope that we need 2-3 more months to get the majority of the gameplay features back in the game.