Unreal Development Kit Used in ‘Infinity Blade’ and ‘Epic Citadel’ Released for iOS Developers

Epic Games have followed through on their much anticipated promise to release an update to their Unreal Development Kit which supports developing apps for iOS. In case you didn’t know this is the engine behind Epic’s impressive “Epic Citadel” technology demo released in the App Store earlier this year, as well as the multi-million dollar grossing “Infinity Blade” iOS app released a week ago.

In fact the “Epic Citadel” demo is included in the package so that you can pick it apart and learn from it. What’s more developers can get their hands on the tools for free, today, here, and unless they earn more than $5,000 for any app they ultimately sell they only ever need to pay Epic a maximum of $99 to publish using these tools. After that Epic would like a reasonable 25% cut of any earnings.

If you have any aspirations for developing games for iOS, Epic’s “UDK” is worth the relatively large download at least, to simply check it out. Even if you are a “modder” more than a coder.

And because the UDK offers a cohesive set of tools for creating and managing game assets with its “Unreal Editor”, as well as a very mature scripting language based on top of a feature full industrial strength game engine you can focus more on creating and less on the hard slog of low level game engine code (for some – I love that btw!).

If I wasn’t a code monkey I would now be faced with a very tough choice between the equally capable, but quite different development possibilities and environments that Unity 3D and Epic’s UDK offer.

I don’t think aspiring developers have had it so good for quite a while. And because of that those of us that also like to play games should be quite excited about what we may see appearing in the App Store in 2011.

Are you excited by Epic’s UDK and what that might mean for the iOS platform? I am playing with it myself today, and would love to hear from others who are doing the same. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Jazz Jackrabbit UDK iOS Tutorial Video

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