A couple of months ago, Epic Games announced that they would be licensing out Unreal Engine 4 to developers who wish to code with it. This came in the form of a subscription service which would cost $19.99 a month, and would also provide developers access to the UE4 engine, editors, and source code. Given that in the past, licensing UE4 would not only be limited to AAA developers, but would cost a whopping $1 million, this was a pretty big deal as it now lets regular developers have access to it.
In fact to show off how easy and flexible the UE4 engine is, one Epic Games employee, who has reportedly no experience in programming (they work as an artist at Epic), released a game based on the UE4 engine. Now this isn’t exactly some fancy game that shows off the engine’s capabilities. Instead, it’s a Flappy Bird clone called Tappy Chicken and it is available for download free from the iTunes App Store or the Google Play Store.
According to Epic, “Tappy Chicken is the perfect showcase for the ease of use and flexibility of Unreal Engine 4. While it may not flex the full graphical muscle of the engine, it shows how almost anyone can make a fun and pretty game fit for mobile devices and web browsers.” There will also be a browser version of the game expected to be released for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera in the near future.
Now we’ve seen our fair share of Flappy Bird clones in the past, but this is probably the first one we’ve seen from a big name developer, like Epic. Then again like we said, the goal is to show off the flexibility and ease of use of UE4, so if you’re a budding developer that would like to dive into creating games, perhaps this will give you some inspiration.
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