Venture in to UDK – That ended with Unity

Starting with UDK and venturing in to Unreal Script.

After working in RPG Maker and getting a grasp on Valve’s Hammer Editor I decided I wanted to pursue a standalone 3D creation utility. Having watched many tutorials and created a basic map using the editor with Unreal Tournament 3, I decided to give the UDK a go. Many of the things I learned in the Unreal Tournament 3 editor carried over to UDK so straight away I was presented with a familiar interface. This was great for level creation however there was still so much more to UDK that I never had to learn with Unreal Tournament 3. Items such as importing resources, creating materials, and working with skeletal mesh physics and animations to name a few.

Sidescroll2-UDKI would learn to address these over the coming weeks as I decided on the type of game I wanted to create. Given the abundance of first-person shooters churned out with UDK, I wanted to take a slightly different approach; the platformer (which there is also no shortage of using UDK). Given I am far too inexperienced to create a platformer akin to Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie, I decided to go with the sidescrolling platformer route – ala Contra. I eventually came across a blog on the Vectorform Labs website with some great starter code to create a sidescrolling shooter through UnrealScript. It was implementing this when the realization set in that I would need to gain at least a basic understanding of this programming language.

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Survival Tunnel

Among another map I was doing for Left 4 Dead at the time, I chose to get sidetracked in to another, smaller map. In addition, I wanted to see if it was possible to create a survival map that would make survival much easier than standard survival maps.

Thus Survival Tunnel was created. As simple as it comes, there are 2 basic sections to defend from; both featuring near-unlimited weapons, ammo, pills, med kits, pipe bombs, and molotov cocktails. Granted that doesn’t mean you can just relax the entire time as tank battles may be more difficult given the small map size.

This map itself can be downloaded at the bottom of this post. To install it, simply copy the unzipped files to the Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead\left4dead\maps folder then run the game form the console using the following command:

changemap l4d_sv_tunnel

I was in the process of creating a .vpk file for it but never could get it to work correctly, so since I have no plans of distributing the map publicly anyway, I thought I would just release the map files as-is.

Download Left 4 Dead – Survival Tunnel