_____________________________________________________________INTERVIEW
[LadyGamers] Tell
us a bit about yourself and USKaarj.
[barnEbiss]
My name is Nathan
Hunt aka barnEbiss, I live on a small rural farm. When I am not doing farm
work I spend my time testing out the latest demos and games and further
learning about 3d modeling and game design.
In early 1999 I was playing a lot of C&C and Starcraft and other RTS that
where out at the time, then when I was at the store I picked up a copy of
unreal and tried it out. I was hooked on the unreal engine the minute I
played it, the big maps and the nicely done monsters. I then began
thinking about how cool it would be to be able to build the unreal monster
and control them like in a RTS that was the idea spark that got me
started.
My team and me first started on converting the unreal engine into a RTS
engine four years ago, and that is when Uskaarj was first truly born. From
then it has been a steady progress and a lot has changed since we started.
When we first started we were working with the old Unreal engine for the
old UT, even with this old engine we found that the unreal engine was
suited for a RTS and could handle it just great. Shortly before we were
nearing first beta for the first Uskaarj, UT2k3 came out and that changed
a lot of things.
In working on designing the RTS Core for Uskaarj we looked back at the RTS
games we had played and there were a lot of them, and we decided that
instead of just picking anyone way we should pick the best parts of
something we liked in one game and try using it in Uskaarj so our mod now
has a truly unique feel to it.
[LadyGamers]: How
did USkaarj2k3 develop out of the first edition
of this Real-time strategy mod for Unreal Tournament?
[barnEbiss]
Well with the first edition of Uskaarj we were very limited to what we
could really do and there was no real outdoor maps for the game. And so
when UT2k3 came out it opened the next door in the development stage of
Uskaarj. We were now able to get a lot more stuff ingame in like a working
Fog of War, a real working RTS mini map, a better mouse control and better
unit key binding and finally a true RTS interface for the mod. Then UT2k4
came out and fixed a lot of things that were wrong with UT2k3 and made
things easier for us in working on Uskaarj and we changed the mod over to
Uskaarj2k4 and now we are in the final stages of coding the RTS core and
getting the gametype and main menu stuff done.
I think once we get all the bugs worked out and
people have tried it they will be amazed that this is mod is using the
unreal engine. And I am hope that once we get any bugs worked out that pop
up we will have a growing fan base like the games C&C generals have and
Starcraft.
[LadyGamers] What
are your future plans for USkaarj and other projects?
[barnEbiss]
I am hoping after we finish USkaarj2k4 to continue working on expanding it
and developing it more with new game play stuff and making it so people
can easily get new units or replacement buildings in using a simple
mutator to replace stuff.
I have a few other projects planned for the future but those are way after
we finish USkaarj2k4 and I am still getting the ideas down for them so I
cant really say much about them only that a few of them will use the RTS
core we have worked on ;)
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