This one goes out to all the game developers out there. If you’ve been deciding which engine you want to use for your next project, Epic have just made the prospect of using UE4 much more enticing, with a massive free trove of assets from the Infinity Blade series.
Most of the content in Epic’s “gift to the development community” is from the unreleased Infinity Blade: Dungeons. But given the brand, you shouldn’t even need to see it to know there will be some sleek sets of armour and medieval weapons. The only catch is that you have to use it in an Unreal Engine 4 product.
But according to Epic, you’ll see content from released games, too:
There are special cameos from released games in the Infinity Blade series, including humorous weapons such as the finger, the lollipop, and the rubber chicken.
My personal favorite is the popular Cardboard Hero armor from Infinity Blade II: Vault of Tears.
You mean, this one?
Epic estimates that the total value of what it’s making available for free is around $US3 million, not that anyone was about to pay that much for it. But it’s still undeniably cool. This is high quality art that Apple even deemed good enough to showcase the graphics in its iPhone 5s reveal last year.
The content is separated into multiple packs with different themes:
Infinity Blade: Grass Lands is the earthy citadel adorned with stone set pieces and beautiful props.
Infinity Blade: Ice Lands is the wintery fort set deep within a glacial enclave.
Infinity Blade: Fire Lands is the radiant castle interior laced with unforgiving paths, dramatic props and flowing lava.
Infinity Blade: Warriors includes loads of assets for crafting fierce heroes.
Infinity Blade: Adversaries has even more content for a making wide variety of rivals.
Infinity Blade: Effects gives you visual effects ranging from fire and smoke to lightning and magical reactions.
Infinity Blade: Sounds includes thousands of raw audio files and sound cue (currently unavailable but they’ll re-add this soon)
Infinity Blade: Weapons presents a vast array of melee weaponry, including never-before-seen swords and axes and also a few Infinity Blade fan favorites.
The move targets indie developers who can now use high quality assets like in the below trailer easily.
It’s kind of a necessary move, too. While UE4 is preferred for larger projects, Unity is by far the engine of choice for indies these days. And while a game jam setting might not be the best thing to extrapolate from, the popularity of Unity conveyed by this tweet isn’t really inaccurate:
Here’s a breakdown of the technologies our jammers said they used in their games. Which one did you use? pic.twitter.com/V4oSv8JT3U
— Global Game Jam (@globalgamejam) January 28, 2015
Along with this announcement came the news that Infinity Blade 3 would be free. There are microtransactions (hoo boy, are there microtransactions), but I’m not complaining. Still a good game of medieval Mike Tyson’s Punchout.
Expect to see a lot of the same kickass swords in upcoming indie games made in UE4. Not a bad thing at all.
Comments
6 responses to “Epic Just Made 7,600 Art Assets Freely Available To Developers”
So just out of interest, why is Unity so much preferred by Indie developers?
A large part is because Unity is preferred by Indie developers.
By that I mean because a large number of them use it, there is a large number of resources, people to answer questions and the like when you get started. Also if you are working with other people as your first project they are more likely to have used unity so they will choose that. So then new people learn unity first and generally stick with it as that is what they know
low barrier of entry – whilst Unreal has done a lot for its asset management and scripting, it’s generally been put together as something best utilised by larger teams with specialised skill sets; eg. when developing graphic assets Unity is a bit more approachable for someone just throwing together basic textures than Unreal, which is more around having your base texture, then displacement maps, specular, glow maps and texture animation and so forth… so you want a specialised artist alongside a specialised designer and a specialised programmer etc.
I think the grassroots community support also places Unity well as a sort of transitional platform between the easy-but-limiting Game Maker type applications, and the capable-but-sometimes-overburdened pro tools… and then indies who aren’t pushing into higher end 3D games might stick with it once they’ve put together some custom modules or the like.
I guess Epic having a subscription for Unreal 4 really did hurt the wider adoption of the engine, even if it was only for a short while
The base version is free, Offers support to multiple platforms, uses a lot of scripting languages people already are familiar with java and C+.
Personally as a hobbiest I find Unity a very pleasant experience.
Man I don’t even know C++ but I downloaded Unreal because of headlines like this. How helpful are the tutorials?