“Rock, paper, shotgun” impressed with Futuregames projects!

Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong, one of our fantastic teachers, has been leading the Unreal Development Kit course. Here is his report to EPIC.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun picked it up and wrote about it, take a look!

No Programmer No Problem: Artist-Only Games

“The current trend towards big middleware developers giving their engines away for free is only going to yield great things. With the intimidating financial up-frontery removed, people with wonderful ideas, a ton of untapped talent and no money will be able to create and publish games made in the likes of Unreal 3 and Unity; no doubt we’ll be posting about many such projects here over the months and years to come.

Here’s an interesting curveball, though: what if someone who isn’t a game developer is let loose on tools this powerful? Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong, better known as the guy behind the splendid Unreal 3 mod (and soon to become commercial and standalone) The Ball, has been leading a Unreal Development Kit course at Stockholm’s fascinating FutureGames Academy. The course lasted six weeks, all-in: three of tuition, and three spent creating games. The clincher? None of the students had any game design experience. Moreover, no programmers were allowed – only designers and artists. They couldn’t possibly make a game on their own, could they? They bloody well could. Several, in fact.”