Randy Davis : I’m the kind of person who’s always writing a game of some sort it’s my hobby. I’ve been asked on several occasions questions of the ‘How would somebody go about doing this?’ variety, and I’m never quite sure what to say, because for me the process has been a gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills, beginning somewhere repressed back in my childhood when my parents would beat me with loaves of soggy french bread (according to my dream therapist).
One of the great things about writing UT mods is that everything you need is included in the game, so there’s no big outlay of cash for a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio or other development tools. I personally use the C-preprocessor on my source .uc files, however, so that I can compile various debug versions using #define and strip comments to make the final file size smaller.
For people just starting out, I would strongly recommend reading all the relevant tutorials at unreal.epicgames.com , and going to www.chessmess.com , reading all the FAQs and joining the mailing list (from a bogus email address, otherwise you’ll get spammed like it was going out of style. (Hotmail is your friend).
One of the big things to remember is that for us amateur game developers, creating a game is more of a journey than a destination. Other people never play about 90% of my games, but that doesn’t mean it is any less fun to work on them. Everything you do will make you better.
Whenever anybody asks a writer how to become a writer, they respond, “Writers write.” Well, mod developers develop mods. So get out there and do it. And you’ll never have an easier time getting your work seen, as there are so many Unreal sites that can host a site for you if you’ve got something people want to see.