It's been a couple months since the 2015 Game Developers Conference took place in San Francisco, and we're just beginning to feel the repercussions of some major changes in game-development tech that were announced at the show. With engines simultaneously becoming faster and cheaper and virtual reality hitting the retail market in a big way later this year, it's an exciting time to study the way games are made — and an even better time to get started making your own.

Nick and Aaron dissect the news from GDC and make some projections about what the broader impact on the established games industry will be. How does proprietary tech (like Bethesda's id Tech, EA's Frostbite Engine, etc.) stay competitive with the accessible and popular Unreal and Unity engines?

Nobody really knows, but it couldn't hurt to make an educated guess.

Show Notes:

0:05:10 - Watch the Unreal Engine 4 apartment walkthrough demo video that we mentioned.
0:19:45 - Call of Duty's engine is the IW Engine, which is built on id tech.
0:31:54 - Here's too much information about Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.
0:34:05 - Student project from Pax 2013: Untitled. Here's more information from the Lake Washington Institute of Tech, who did the demo.

 

Header: "Unreal Engine 4 - Demo" screenshot by Flickr user K putt. Used under the Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0 license.

Intro/outro music: "Sunrise" by WJLP. Used under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 3.0 license.