Unreal Tournament: Epic Games Reveals Community Concept Art, Design Process

If you may remember, Epic Games announced plans to outsource development of the new Unreal Tournament. Today, Epic has revealed concept art and progress for this game. They have also shed a lot more light on how they are going about the game’s development.

These images were highlights from the art Epic received after making the callout to fans to make this concept art in the official forums. On the podcast, Epic’s staff were enthusiastic about the results they have received. They observed and were happy about the fan choices for less sexualized, more credible female character designs, the functionality of the gun designs, and how, overall, many of the fan concepts built on and were reminiscent of some original Unreal concepts from years back.

As Epic’s staff points out, they do have the environmental artists needed to work on the game on their own. Their intentions here are to include the community into the design process as a whole. With that in mind, they’ve come up with a new initiative, to color some new environmental art they have made. Said images are hosted on Polycount.

They also talked about their initial attempts to get feedback on the Unreal UX. They got gamers who have no experience with their franchise to try the game out, without explanation on how the interface worked, and figured out how they reacted. They found that fans were averse to the colors red and green, and they also need to tweak how the crosshairs and HUD work.

So, it’s clear now that Epic is making Unreal Tournament in such a way that the community is directly involved from the very onset. It should be interesting to see how this plays out when we get to the actual builds, but here and now, it’s an interesting little experiment, and we look forward to seeing the final result, but also the process itself.

You can check out more concept art and hear Epic’s observations on each handpicked piece here. Follow Gameranx for more information on Unreal Tournament, including release date and platforms, in the future.