Once I decided the theme for my thesis I started to do some overall research on how to accomplish everything I wanted to do. The easy part was deciding how to create the graphics (since I've been studying Autodesk Maya that was the easy choice, though I did do some work in 3DS Max over the summer, I'm just not confident enough in the program yet to feel comfortable using it).
The hard part was deciding how to accomplish the "interactive" part of my thesis. For that I researched several engines and editors. Since the inspiration for my thesis came from Dear Esther, I decided to first look at Valve's Source Engine and see what it was all about. Source Engine is a game development engine with a fairly broad and comprehensive set of tools for game creation including asset management for custom made graphics and management for Audio (Which is something I would like to have in my final project). It's also a tried and tested engine since it's been used, not only for Dear Esther, but also for Valve's Team Fortress Series, Half Life Series and Counter Strike. The Source SDK is available to the public if you have a copy of one of Valve's source engine games (Team Fortress 2 is free and I own copies of Portal and Portal 2) along with the map creation/level editing software called the Hammer Editor. Unfortuneatly, I have very little experience and minimal knowledge of either Source or the Hammer Editor and they both suffer from the fact that they are first and foremost modding software -which while there is nothing inherantly wrong with that (again, Dear Esther) it might limit me in what I can accomplish in the long run.
So moving on from there I decided to take a look at Unity, which is one of the best known game engines on the college student market. Unity has some pretty great features, including assest management for both art and Audio. It also benefits from it's renderer which has a "Deferred Lighting path" and a batching system. However, the majority of the parts of the Unity engine that makes the games made on it pretty are only part of Unity Pro (Which involves paying money and suffering through licensing problems).
The hard part was deciding how to accomplish the "interactive" part of my thesis. For that I researched several engines and editors. Since the inspiration for my thesis came from Dear Esther, I decided to first look at Valve's Source Engine and see what it was all about. Source Engine is a game development engine with a fairly broad and comprehensive set of tools for game creation including asset management for custom made graphics and management for Audio (Which is something I would like to have in my final project). It's also a tried and tested engine since it's been used, not only for Dear Esther, but also for Valve's Team Fortress Series, Half Life Series and Counter Strike. The Source SDK is available to the public if you have a copy of one of Valve's source engine games (Team Fortress 2 is free and I own copies of Portal and Portal 2) along with the map creation/level editing software called the Hammer Editor. Unfortuneatly, I have very little experience and minimal knowledge of either Source or the Hammer Editor and they both suffer from the fact that they are first and foremost modding software -which while there is nothing inherantly wrong with that (again, Dear Esther) it might limit me in what I can accomplish in the long run.
So moving on from there I decided to take a look at Unity, which is one of the best known game engines on the college student market. Unity has some pretty great features, including assest management for both art and Audio. It also benefits from it's renderer which has a "Deferred Lighting path" and a batching system. However, the majority of the parts of the Unity engine that makes the games made on it pretty are only part of Unity Pro (Which involves paying money and suffering through licensing problems).
So finally, I decided to use UDK, which I do have experience using. In preparation for Unreal Engine 4, UDK has undergone some changes since the last time I used it, however I have spent a little time keeping up with some of the changes to UDK. The biggest problem I can forsee in the long run is audio asset management, which I've had problems with in the past.
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