Today Shane and I met around 8:45 to dri
ve down to Crossroads Boulevard so that we could visit Epic Games. Upon arrival we were greeted by a man named Steve Polge. He walked us through the super cool campus that featured a two story high character from one of Epic Games most recent games, a climbing wall in the main relaxation room, a slide to get from the second floor to the first, and multiple testing rooms for outsiders to come in and test the newest builds for the games.
After the initial tour we got to go back to Mr. Polge’s quarters where he along with his 20 man team are working on the upcoming Unreal Tournament which is currently in Pre-Alpha stages, it was really interesting to see how even such a huge company has such small teams creating games that aren’t all that popular just yet. Mr. Polge was the lead of the team in creating the game, and he was in charge of overseeing what happens. The team, however, also has many different sectors. They have QA’s, an animator, graphic designers, coders, and artists. Each of which work together to create the final version of the game. Throughout the day we learned that each member is only efficient of all of the other members work together. There were times throughout the day that members of each of the fields had to work on tasks that were meant to be done by one of the other fields. This turns out to be very common, understandable, considering how small the team is and how much is to be done in order to eventually produce the game.
After a bit of testing and gameplay, Shane and I were taken to lunch by Mr. Polge, he asked us a few questions about our backgrounds in the field, as well as anything new that we learned or any suggestions that we have for the game. It was cool to learn about how he started out in the field and what interested him originally to stick with Epic Games, and specifically unreal tournament.
After returning back to the facilities from lunch we went back to testing the game, looking for bugs, and also finding new possible changes. It was cool because this time we got to tryout a different game mode and actually play with each other.
Lastly after all questions were asked, we were brought into a test run. 8 of the members from the team as well as shane and I hit if off in a 5 v 5 game where we got to play the game with some real competition for once, rather than the bots that we had been playing with throughout the day. After playing a couple games we had a meeting to converse about any noticible mistakes or places in which the game should be fixed or changed in the future.
All in all the day was so much fun and it was awesome to get to meet Mr. Polge and his team as well as get introduced into that sort of field.