Unreal Universe James Schmalz Interview

James Schmalz Interview

Apache talks Tournament with James Schmalz

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In this interview we chat with James Schmalz, one of the original minds behind Unreal.

The Interview

Unreal Universe: Who are you and what do you do at Epic?

James: I do game design and art. I used to be more focused on programming, but I do that much less now, just enough to keep in touch with the programming side of development and to understand the design/content limitations of the engine.

Unreal Universe: How did you / Digital Extremes get started in games?

James: About 17 years ago, I got an appleII+ and started immediately into creating games for it. A couple years later I finished my first game, but It never got published (Hey, I was only 15). Several years after that, I got my first game published while I was in university and after that I got into doing shareware games when shareware was big in the early/mid 90's. Then we moved on into large development teams and going fully retail with Unreal and UT.

Unreal Universe: What role did you play in the development of Unreal?

James: I suppose I initially concieved the game after my pinball projects. It was a totally different game when I started the project by myself, but eventually it morphed into what was to become Unreal.

Unreal Universe: How about Unreal Tournament?

James: I did a lot of different tasks on UT although I didn't concieve the idea for UT. I believe the initial idea was Steve Polge's. He was interested in expanding the Bot AI to a more team based setup and he suggested the UT game styles.

Unreal Universe: What are the biggest strengths of Unreal Tournament?

James: Fun. That pretty much describes it. It is so kickass fun to play. It's fast and furious and you can get in and play a 10 minute match and have a good time, or play for 10 hours straight and have a blast. At the end of Unreal development, it was a boring tedious task to play through the game over and over and over again, but with UT, it's a kickass fragfest everytime we put together a new version to test.

Unreal Universe: What's the development status of Unreal Tournament?

James: Fixing bugs, tweaking and testing. We are doing a shitload of testing, so we don't have the same problem we did with Unreal :)

Unreal Universe: What will the Unreal Tournament demo contain? How many levels and what modes of play will it sport? Will there be bots in the demo? When will it be released?!

James: Disclaimer: The following _may_ change, but this is the current plan.

Minigun, Shockrifle, Enforcer, Duel Enforcer, Impact Hammer, Translocator, Rocket launcher.

3 Deathmatch maps and 2 domination maps.

The Instagib mutator (everyone will LOVE this)

Bots

1 mesh with 2 different skins.

The plan is to release it when UT goes gold

Unreal Universe: Will there be a demo of Unreal?

James: Maybe. If the demand is still there for a demo, we can release one, but I think most of the people who wanted to play Unreal have already played Unreal.

Unreal Universe: What's next for Epic Games after Unreal Tournament?

James: We haven't discussed this too much. It will be an all new game engine though.

Unreal Universe: How do you think Unreal Tournament will compete against other games in the shooter genre?

James: We think it will do extremely well. :)

Thanks for the info James!