In 2009, Epic Games and Intel announced the $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal Contest, and we formed a team, UnrealPHD. We created a custom map called Starbase Defense with a Star Wars type feel and a flyable Tie Interceptor we created. Our game submission qualified during all 4 development phases over a years time. In 2009 the competition ended and we received an honorable mention from Epic Games for our entry. We had a lot of fun and we had learned a lot about level design and Unreal Engine 3.

In November 2009, after the first version of Unreal Development Kit was released, we created one of the first complete video tutorials on Game Design with UDK, and named it “Introduction to Unreal Development Kit”. It was available as a Digital Download or a shipped DVD video. A 3 1/2 hour long tutorial teaching the basics of 3DSMax, texturing, importing content to UDK, creating levels and deploying the game for PC to share it with friends. With the new Unreal Engine 4 released in March 2014, the tutorial became outdated and we removed it from our website.

In 2011 we began working on “Ogre Islands” an evade and survive game. It was never finished, but we have many custom characters, weapons, and props completed, and it will one day be revisited and revived. You can check out the gallery and videos and read more about Ogre Islands here. We also helped others in the Unreal Engine Community, like in this Archiviz example UDK Character Integration. And here is another video just having some fun with Motion Capture.

The latest results of UnrealPHD efforts is the Jumpy Frogs iOS game, available on Appstore. Since the new Unreal Engine 4 release, Jumpy Frogs is being updated and will also be released for Android and HTML5 platforms. You can read more about it here Jumpy Frogs and here jumpyfrogs.com.