Enabling Creators: The Unreal Ecosystem | PGC Digital #1

so thanks for coming yes my name is Alan new I'm the lead evangelist over the Americas for Epic Games and today I'm going to talk about enabling creators and the Unreal ecosystem so the question is what is the Unreal ecosystem well besides the engine there are a number of other resources programs and initiatives that we have shared with you and collectively we refer to these as the Unreal ecosystem so for this talk we'll be talking a little bit about the history of Epic Games and how we enable creators from the very beginning we'll talk about the evolution of the Unreal Engine and then beyond that the Unreal ecosystem which is really that meat of the talk here today and then we'll talk a little bit about movies as well so first up Epic Games so from the very beginning you know today we might see epic games as you know there's large comedy right much success in recent years and probably viewed as this sort

of a behemoth type of organization but really the start of the company is very very indie we started out very very small and from the beginning you sought to enable developers in a variety of different ways so the company originally started in 91 is Potomac computer systems wait time sweetie working from his parents basement and a little bit of a fun fact here so there's a small conference room at headquarters named Kim's basement very small meeting room but it's a nice little reminder of how the company got its start and so Tim had developed a product called ZZT which he released its share and shortly after that he renamed the company epic megagames so at the time there his competition had these very large grandiose sounding names in order to kind of have some of that cachet he went ahead and made an epic megagames because it sounded big as he said even though he was only the sole employee alright and this is a look at ZZT so it might not look like a whole lot today

and quite honestly back then in you know the early 90s there were games that looked a little more technologically advanced than this but what was important about this but why is ezt became popular was because of it creation of an object-oriented scripting language so this allowed the playerbase the community to get involved in a way that went beyond just playing the game you know players could extend and create all new types of game plans and while doing research for this presentation I recently learned that there was a contest and the best player of creative worlds were included in the game then I found out that six of those applicants actually ended up becoming employees of that thing so and another fact is easy the final copy of ZZT shipped in late 2013 so that's quite the long tail there and afterwards we moved on to Unreal Tournament and the interesting thing

about the Unreal Tournament game is that it also shipped with the level editor and unreal script your continuing ethics trend of openness and sharing so players could extend the game through modding using the same tool set that game itself was built off and so we saw all kinds of branding innovations right like new levels weapons vehicles game types etc and so players became modders and these modders were then taking their first steps to becoming bona fide developers and so you may have heard of psionics they have a game called rocket League which was pretty insanely successful actually so rocket League started out as a product called supersonic aerobatic rocket powered battle cars which itself was spawned from mod work done in the Unreal Tournament engine team of college students had gotten together and started modifying and real turned into complete vehicles and things just took off from there and then in the early 2000s modern

GPUs brought forth a brand new era of high end graphics graphic fidelity made a massive jump and Unreal Engine 3 was there at that time so it brought forward the idea of level editing tools and unreal script from a tournament but also had a number of other new features such as the material editor and a particle editor called cascade and then kismet which was first steps in visual scripting and then Matt Mae was another tool that was also visually oriented in nature so formerly where these different aspects of game development were handled by programmers now anybody on the team could jump in and get started developing these things really freeing them up so the editor dramatically improved work law and with that adoption and usage of the engine really start to take off in triple-a game development and sort of also that mid tier that kind of existed back in the day as well and then we've released

the free version of Yui 3 called Unreal development kit also known as UDK and while UV 3 was largely known as the shooter engine it became much easier to develop new types of games and inspire hundreds of hundreds new developers to take the plunge into game development and then with you before and even thicker effort was made to make game dev even more accessible so it was now even easier to make all different types of games so the concept of project 10 projects templates and content packs were introduced and then even more importantly blueprint takes the visual scripting concepts of e VIII's kismet and really expand upon that a great way so now entire games can be made without a single line of code enabling everybody to the founder and the new licensing model meant that the engine was completely free to download and start using and also source code was freely available as well and if you look across social media Twitter Facebook

groups etc and you can see that amazing amazing things are being made looking before and then we should mention the fortnight in this as well so with the successive fortnight as we go out there and we visit different Studios we constantly get asking it what is the secret sauce that Vic has not gained that we're holding back from the rest of the developing community and really there are no secrets whatsoever so the answer is if you want to know what's in the engine go ahead and download fortnight every couple of weeks and give it a play and all that new stuff that you see in there will be come to the engine very soon and so the question is what is all this reflection all about what am I trying to impress funny here is that from the very humble beginnings of epic games enabling creators through the sharing of tools technology and knowledge has been part of the company's DNA ok so let's talk about the Unreal ecosystem because when you download unreal like not only do you

get this great technology that used to make all these great games but there's a number of other services resources and initiatives that can help you as you're developing your titles some of these you might not be aware of and so for the purposes of talk I'm going to be referring to those as the unreal because the stuff this is everything outside of the engine that is provided so we'll talk about epic games publishing epic game store online services mega brands the marketplace the support channels and source code all right ed game is publishing you recently announced our publishing efforts and like Tim says there we're building the publishing model that we always wonder for ourselves when we were working with publishers fast and so what does that mean we provide full creative freedom and ownership of IP so developers retain all the rights to their properties and they can continue expanding on those properties however they see fit

even if our relationship doesn't continue forward at the future so fully funded projects will cover all development costs 20% of developer salaries all the market expenses to a localization marketing etc and 50/50 profit sharing so developers who earn their fair share for their work and once cost of record recouped developers earn at least fifty percent of all profits and we're starting small we have a few choice developers that we've done in partnership with here we're going to grow this slowly we're going to make sure that we get everything right with just publishing and more infos gonna be forthcoming you can see what we're working with gem design did the Last Guardian play dead famous for inside and limbo and remedy entertainment who recently released control okay so we can talk about the

store now you know in today's age we don't feel that the 70/30 split is equitable you know back in the day when online storefronts first becoming a thing this flip was probably fine right there are all kinds of unknowns infrastructure I had to be built out risks need to be take it and it was a lot better than the deal that developers used to get back in the days of brick and mortar and shipping and cartridges and CDs but a lot has changed since then and online storefronts are pretty much the norm and find ourselves at Epic to be in a position to try some new things and so with the game store developers are gonna earn eighty eight percent and we feel this is much more fair much more equitable and it puts more money back now handed developers and allows them to create a sustainable business alright so the store launched December 6 2018 so it's a bit of just over a year old there and so far has been very successful for

developers selling through the store of course everybody wants to know that they can get on the store but for now we're still building out some of the tools and functionality needed before we open up the doors on Twitter and so the strategy for us today is that we're focusing on exclusives in order to grow a healthy sustainable audience and then provide the best possible experience for developers and consumers alike okay so there is the score page and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom you're going to see that there's an application there so even though we have our highly curated list of games on the store at the moment if you're working on a project that you think might be suitable for the store you can fill out that application which we can take a look at here and so we're just looking at a little bit of contact information description of the game and tell us about your team your project and if you can like please please include a video so that is the most important you know we get a ton of applications so if

you're going to apply just please please be patient okay so we can talk about online services so during the course of developing your own games we have to solve a number of tough problems your networking is not easy right and so now we're sharing all of that tech that we developed with everybody else it is a C++ SDK that works across any engine any platform and any store and currently the Yui for integration is available and support for other engines on the way so the features that we have available right now are game analytics which allow you to store gameplay data and get a site insight into player behavior from there you can go ahead and turn your attention and engage them but Dad we have dashboards that allow you to visualize and interpret the data in real time and also we have a ticketing system so the customer support tools enable ADA a track to provide high quality personalized support and you can see

some of the features coming soon there play a rating system where devs can see both positive and negative feedback directly from the players communications in game comms between players across any platform parties of course allow the playing excuse me allowing players to group up and play together and then we have our overlay on the way which is unified UI for friends and other features available to players across different games and different engines so we built these services for fortnight and we also rely on these same services for our store and our engine and thanks for a good fortune we're in a position to give them away for free to developers everywhere there's great overview information and an FAQ at the URL there and there's a ton of great information within the docs about online services as well so I highly recommend you look at that if you're interested in many more all right

I picked mega grants so originally there was a program we called unreal def grant a few years ago and there was a five million dollar fund that we gave away it was very successful we saw lots of really great stuff being made and so now with our our fortune we can our good fortunes we can really expand upon this program so we started unreal maybe grassed and so now the fund is one hundred million dollars to be distributed over the next five years and basically if you have a great project and could use a little bit of extra financial support then you can go ahead and apply now it's important to note that this program is not intended to fund the entirety of your projects development but it is there to provide a small boost to keep you going so that you can get over whatever immediate financial hump is and your future so if

you have a great Unreal Engine game and development you should obviously apply but keep in mind that there are some other categories that we can award grants there as well so educational initiatives open-source projects etc etc and you know when we're talking about educational initiatives we're not just talking about projects attached to establish learning institutions like universities or colleges so for example if you're creating Unreal Engine tutorials on YouTube or something or twitch you can you may qualify you know perhaps you need a new capture rig or microphone or soundproofing tiles or whatever it is you can apply for a grant under the educational category and then open-source as well recently we awarded blender foundation with a nice little grant for their work that they have done into the design and evolution of blender and you know so if you perhaps have some cool plugin that generates a really interesting content or improves workflow you know that may qualify the open source category we also have

categories for media and entertainment so those of you not in game did or if you have friends outside of game did you might be able to apply under those categories alright so some tips for men Congrats give your project a recognizable name so this is important because an epic the team that evaluates the many grants is distributed across many different offices so if it's if the team can converse and communicate about your game of the recognizable name you know they can attach to that right you know some of these conversations happen in the hallway is some of them over email etc but yeah you tell us about your project tell us why you're compelled to pursue it and tell us what separates it from all the other projects out there you know and have you scoped the project appropriately tell us about your team how many people do you have and you know what's the breakdown of disciplines across that team and also your timeline you know what kind of milestones are you looking at shows that you've thought through the development process and you

know at least you the best of your abilities it can be difficult to layout the entire project timeline but shows that you've thought about it you have some idea think about how much money you could use and tell us how you would use it as well you know perhaps you're going to be using that money to purchase some some content packs or you want to hire some extra programming support just let us know how you're going to use it and a playable build is great but can be challenging for us at epic to go through them all so more importantly please include a link to a video that's like the most important thing alright and there's the URL for links to you the mega Grants Program and you'll see the application on that page alright the marketplace so there's 9000 different content packs available on the marketplace it's all high-quality content it's a great way to

spin up new prototypes we you know this is really great-looking stuff you know also in addition to that you know some of the most popular games on the planet shipped with content actually in there in those titles so marketplace submissions are curated as we are looking to keep the bar high you know we want to have a certain level of quality of all of the content that's out there and support so if you are operating under the EULA which everyone that downloads the engine and agrees to you you are answer hub is the community driven support structure it has a searchable history we also have our forums there's lots of really great developers out there really strong community willing to jump in and help other folks out and we have social media as well so we have our official twitter handles and so the official twitter handle of epic games is building very

developer centric and so the content that that account shares is it aims to provide value to other developers so do not expect them to retweet your games announcement or Kickstarter or anything like that right but on the evangelism team we have a little more leeway there we have our personal accounts that we quite often use for for business and we can do a little bit more of that promotions but please note that this is not an invitation to blow up our DMS with you know again your Kickstarter or what have you if you just use your hashtag appropriately we should be able to see those come across our our fee and of course twitch we have inside unreal which is our weekly show in which we do in our two hours of developer interviews and demonstrations all those good things and as far as community goes we have there's a few different a few different groups out there that are doing cool stuff the Unreal Engine developer Facebook group is really awesome that I

like that one because it provides a really great view into what's going on there in the entire world and the folks that run that group also run the Unreal Engine jobs Facebook group as well so that's really good if you're looking for folks to hire or you're in the market to meet higher I shall mention unreal slackers disk or an awesome disc or channel that has over 30,000 members or something at this point and then of course there's reddit it's pretty active form over there as well and then the final piece of the ecosystem all I talked about was source code so freely available through github and can just be massive massive assistance as you're developing your game you know perhaps something is going on there where you're not exactly sure why the engine is doing you know what it is you're getting unexpected results and you can download the source code and step through and find out exactly what is going on under the hood we also accept pull requests we've incorporated thousands and thousands of those back into the engine from the community so you can go ahead and submit those and

here's all the information on getting started with source code with links to github and there's information on how to format and submit those requests so you have the best chance and success all right and then the final part of the talk unreal Indies so we covered the engine and the company itself and now we're going to talk about what the realities is which is our initiative demonstrating our commitment to developers excuse me to developers everywhere so indie developers hobbyists small studios all over the world if that description fits you but let's say you need to talk to somebody at epic but you don't have a contact or you don't know how to reach out to you can reach out to us on the evangelism team we run this page and we can offer you guidance advice and we can make connections that you need there are two components the portal and also the Indy at Unreal Engine com alias so as

part of this talk you've seen some of the different resources that we offer what the portal does is collects all of those together and more and really provides a one-stop shop for all this information that's going to be important to you as an indie developer or a small developer you know we have information on the store mega grants all of that and there's also a bunch of information that you might not have considered as well so the example we like to use is you know you're developing your game and perhaps you want to put the Unreal logo at the front you know the question is where do you you get those files you know what are the rules attached to using that so there's a link on the portal that gives you all of that information or if you're providing your ship date and maybe your Kickstarter is about to hit his funding target and suddenly you have to consider recording royalties you know who do you talk to about that how do you even do that that information is also on the portal there the portal in live for several months and it will continue to grow in the coming weeks and then we

also have the contact address there you can feel free to use that to reach out to us for example you know you've gone through the portal you look at all the resources there perhaps you have a question that just hasn't been answered using by using this email the evangelism team is on the other end of it you can go ahead and get you a response as soon as possible so for example like if you have a project and you know it's amassed this you know swell of support and you may have a sizable hit on your hands suddenly that 5% royalty from the EULA is looking like it's gonna be a lot of money that you're gonna have to pay back to Petric you know or maybe you need some developer support beyond the community driven answer how that forums you know at that point if those two conditions are what you're looking at then it sounds like you need to start discussing custom licensing and so we can if you reach out to us and make us aware we can put you in touch with the team that handles custom license you can

get those conversations started for you or you know maybe you just want to know when we're gonna be coming to town and providing demonstrations you know we can drop by your user group you can always hit us up at this email as well and we can set something up for you alright so that pretty much concludes the talk for today we talked about from the very beginning of the company how we've been enabling creators and how we have the Unreal ecosystem this large collection of resources initiatives that will help you on your development path and we talked about the realities as well because that dedicated channel for small developers all over the world so I hope you found that useful and interesting and thank you very much thank you very much that was fantastic so we have some questions for you that's okay so we've got some comments as well from Ronaldo saying it's good see how much show you're supporting blender and also donut is so saying yeah thank you to the

insights we also I'll stop the question so what's the most it's an anonymous attendee so are people feeling a little bit shy this morning what's the most common mistake you see new developers making okay you know actually the first thing that comes to mind when and I'm talking about developers that are new to unreal engine you know I mentioned blueprint is part of Unreal Engine 4 how that's really back feature set that visual scripting language is so important to the end of one of the questions we get is you know well do I have to have do I have to use blueprint for the entirety of the project do I have to use C+ or can I use C++ entirely like what's the right balance there and really it depends on the size of the team the scope of the project and really the makeup of the team as well and I guess a sort of related note as well

teams that come to you before that have traditionally not opened up some of the interactivity portions of game development like scripting like how do two members of the team that are programmers you know they will we've seen teams that have neglected to use blueprint which is fine again you can create entire even in C++ but really you're not getting the most bang for your buck out of the engine if you're not leveraging blueprint like it really does enable developers to handle some of the cons they some of the tasks that the programmer might think is mundane right like you know do you really want to be burning up cycles of a programmer you know some of the more expensive members of the team I'm doing things like you know opening doors or you know a powerup pickup or something like that you can put that back in the hands of the designer so yeah I would say maybe not leveraging blueprint appropriately starting off yeah that makes a lot of

sense so the next question we've got is how has the promo incident affected your numbers particularly on the store mmm there's a good lass so I'm actually not familiar with the day-to-day of the store and how we've been performing particularly during coronavirus obviously it's affected the game industry in a dramatic way you know I think across the industry numbers are up in general with gaming so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that but yeah I don't have a specific insight into that afraid no but in terms of general development humor video the benefit of the fact we are all digital medium first anyway does mean for developers at least the ability to collaborate and share and engage together is already in place yes I thought the question was in reference specifically to the store very small

general I mean you know in this store was one aspect so for us personally an epic you know certain teams it's a worldwide company right we have a lot of offices all over the place and you know we have we do have a lot of those structures in place to facilitate communication so for a good portion of the company it's almost kind of business as usual you know my team for example is spread across the US and Brazil and Ecuador and Latin America there so you know our team in particular is used to working this way you know the rendering team is also similar it distributed so yeah it's a but as other members of the company that aren't used to working in that fashion come online you know there's kind of that quiet period for the initial week I think is everyone got started and you know got their webcams placed all that good stuff but it wasn't until like the second week that everyone really you know that came back to life

yeah it's been it's been challenging but I think we're making the best of it I think that sums up everybody now we only got a minute left really so I've got three questions but essentially they come down to what is the sort of the kind of content that people are looking for upcoming particularly given the kind of content you've got an epic store already and they've already got a game on say unity why should we move to you guys now yeah so we get that question quite a bit actually um you know why switch from community to unreal I'll answer that part of the question so I said the crate was switched from unity to unreal as a form of unity guy I get it yeah so uh you know that's a massive massive topic to cover you know again I'll point to just a few of the obvious ones you know availability of source code is a big one for our developers you know all of the different things that we talked about today but

unreal ecosystem you know epic really is here to enable developers to enable creators to make their projects you know again I'll reference for tonight we've had a lot of success with fortnight and we iterate on it very rapidly again like all the tech that goes into that we share with everyone so you know everything that makes for night as successful as it is all developers get access to that as well you know we've been making games for a long time ourselves so we feel like we have a pretty good idea of the types of tools and technology that needs to be built so that's I'd say another big factor in that yeah are the tests that I think I'm the first met mark rain back in 98 when we were hosting Unreal Tournament on a dial-up modem platform called wire play that's that's how long I've you guys on that note I'm going to say thank you very much and that was fantastic and hopefully everybody enjoyed that are we going to ask Anna to come up and join us