The developers of Gears of War and the Unreal Tournament games are currently working on a new project. On their ‘Animation Bootcamp: Animation Prototyping for Games’ panel at the GDC, Lead Animator Jay Hosfelt said that the game will be developed without a publisher.
What started as a tech demo back in 2011 may now become a fully fledged title. If their concept has changed over time cannot be said. According to the tech demo, our protagonist is a slender thug with a heart of gold and a skin of steel. Living in a dystopian future, where police men beat up old ladies and possibly steal candy from little children, he’s the only hope for justice.
Right now, name, release date and general concept are unknown. The tech demo is currently the only clue on what might be going on in the game. Epic Games has a reputation of releasing tech demos of future titles. The developer plans to make an unspecified announcement on the GDC.
Concept art presented on their panel shows astonishing similarities with the Samaritan. With the same physique, clothes and hairstyle, the only difference is that the ‘Samaritan’ is carrying a pole-like weapon behind his back and a revolver on his side. The typical cigarette, as seen in the tech demo, got its appearance on Concept Art as well.
Apart from this, Epic Games have been talking about character/ model creation in next-gen. Hosfelt said that with the increasing amount of work necessary to create a good-looking model, rapidly created models are used in fast design exercises in an effort to “fail early and often”. The creation of next-gen polygonal models can take up to several months.
The Lead Animator estimates that with the new Unreal Engine 4, the time between the idea phase and a playable prototype is about one week. Without the new technology, as with Gears of War 3, the same stage of playability would take about 12 weeks.
UPDATE: Epic’s new project wil have nothing in common with the Samaritan demo. This was announced yesterday by Paul Meegan via Twitter.
We love that people are excited about our unannounced game, but it's entirely new and has nothing to do with the Samaritan demo.
— Paul Meegan (@PaulMeegan) March 18, 2014
