Always a summer highlight, the annual Develop:Brighton conference and the Develop Industry Excellence Awards are happening next week in the lively beach town of Brighton, England. We’re pleased to announced the fantastic Unreal Engine developers who will join Epic at the show.
Here are folks you can meet at the Unreal Engine stand, which spans Develop’s entire Networking Lounge area.
Rising star indie team Cardboard Sword will be showing their incredible-looking 2D game Siege and the Sand Fox built with Unreal Engine 4. Nearly a dozen of us from Epic went by and played this in the UKIE booth during GDC 2016 and fell in love. We are happy to have these talented folks on our stand.
Sumo Digital, who are developing both Dead Island 2 and Crackdown 3, recently revealed Snake Pass, a product of the studio’s first internal game jam. Albeit smaller in scope than the blockbuster games Sumo are working to ship, the action puzzler was named one of The Guardian’s favourite games at EGX Rezzed 2016. That was an early showing of the game from which Sumo had hoped to simply take in community feedback, and it’s fair to say the results were quite positive. This is another game we can’t wait to enjoy.
Mad Head Games will be showing their brand new game KingeWitch for the very first time on the Unreal Engine stand. Stay tuned for details on the game by following @madhatgames on Twitter.
The Chernobyl VR Project is a unique VR application by The Farm 51 which blends an educational and movie narrative approach with photogrammetry scanning seamlessly mixed with 360 movies all in UE4 to create a unique and photorealistic experience. It is the very first virtual tour around the Chernobyl and Pripyat area, and it is available now on the Oculus Store. Also, the team is donating a portion of proceeds to victims of the Chernobyl disaster.
After recently celebrating the one-year anniversary of their successful Kickstarter, R8 Games will have Develop attendees go hands on with their anti-gravity racer Formula Fusion.
Pixelblimp will be rounding out the offering of games on show with Jump Stars, their competitive party game for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
Drop by to play a few games, relax on a beanbag and enjoy refreshments.
We’ll also have staff on hand demonstrating Unreal Engine 4 tools as well as new projects on the enterprise side of the business.
In addition, our European community manager Jess Hider will be giving a talk “Beyond Unreal Engine: How Epic empowers developers through more than just technology.” This is all about how we at Epic can help you be more successful through the power of the community, co-marketing, Unreal Dev Grants, custom license terms and more.
At the Develop Awards it will be Epic’s honour for European Territory Manager Mike Gamble to present Studio of the Year to a well-deserving team.
Speaking of Mike, he’s the person who brought Epic together with Staffs Uni as part of the company’s first long-term, official academic partnership. After establishing the Epic Games Centre at Staffordshire University and serving as a guest lecturer ever since, he has just been awarded an Honorary Doctor of the University from Staffs. Congrats, Mike!
Going back to the awards, we are very happy to be to be once again nominated for a Develop Industry Excellence Award. We have four wins under our belt so far and would be thrilled to take home Best Engine this year to bring that number to five. Here’s Epic’s Partner Spotlight in case you’d like to have a look.
This year's Develop Awards take place on Wednesday, July 13th at the Brighton Hilton Metropole, and recognize the best in games development talent from across the UK and Europe. You can find a full list of finalists here.
Here are folks on our team you can expect to find at Develop: Dean Barratt (@BastionPR), Dana Cowley (@danacowley), Jess Hider (@jesshider), Mike Gamble, Simon Jones (@fekker), Osman Tsjardiwal (@ozmant).
Please say hello if you’ll be there. We look forward to seeing you!