Epic friends over at Polycount have announced their very first 2D concept art contest! Epic provided them a series of images of some basic levels that participants are welcome, but not required to use in the contest. Contestants are encouraged to experiment with new themes as well as take on the older styles of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Tournament is being developed using Unreal Engine 4 in the open in close collaboration between Epic and the community. When the game is playable, it will be free. Not free to play, just free. For more details, see here.

There will also be some amazing prizes from both Polycount and Epic Games!

Polycount:

•All winning entries will receive a full size Greentooth Trophy.

•Polycount will also pick a single entry as our own favorite and award them with one of the following of the winner’s choice: A New-generation console (Xbox One or PS4) or Occulus Rift DK2 kit. If you are outside of North America, you will receive the cash equivalent.

Epic Games:

•All entries that Epic chooses as a winner will receive a round of feedback from Chris Perna, Art Director at Epic Games. You will then have the opportunity to produce a few more concepts to fully flesh out your vision for the theme or level.

•All entries that Epic Games accepts for use will receive official credit as a ‘Concept Artist’ on the new Unreal Tournament game.

•Any entry submitted to the contest has a chance to be featured in an upcoming Unreal Tournament art book to be published by Epic. Each artist who had a winning entry will have an opportunity to write about their entry. As well, they will receive a hard copy of the book signed by the team at Epic.

For all of the official rules and information, check out the the contest page over at Polycount!

A work-in-progress thread his made for all entries here 🙂

I’ve been browsing UE4 forums since a while now. Specially the new UT4 section. I must say there is a lot of enthusiasm from everyone that like UT. Interest come from player, developer, mapper, modeler, skinner, scripter, etc and it’s awesome to see all that activity. In fact, it’s been ages I didn’t saw so much interest for a new UT 🙂 Keep in mind the game is in a very early stage but seeing so much involvement coming from everywhere with official support, it will be a blast for sure 😀

Now, since I’m a mapper, I see there is already a high amount of remakes and other maps that as been introduce for UT3 for example that will be release for UT4. I’ve been surprised to see the mapper Sneh on UT4 mapping forum since he left the UT3 scene many years ago leaving a bunch of unreleased classic maps ! He’s now working on them again, yippie ! ChongLee, a well now mapper as also jump into UT4, which is a great news for all. He’s one of the best UT3 mapper I know and one of my favorite héhé ! Few veterans are also started to work on new maps for UT4 ! This is simply awesome ! Take a look at those, they are very promising :

Remakes

DM-Ariza by IllpIll
DM-Deck-CLee by ChongLee
DM-Gothic by Sneh
DM-Idoma by Trev and Mariomguy
DM-HyperBlast by Sneh
DM-Peak-CLee by ChongLee
DM-Sulphuris by Paradox_

Other very interesting maps

1on1 Chamber by Castle
CTF-Bleak by Tigerclaw
CTF-NeoTokyo by KitatusStudios
CTF-Sprinta246 by Tigerclaw
CTF-Test-JP01 by Jayoplus
DM-Akidot by Jayoplus
DM-DeepBlue by ChongLee
DM-Hope by Teddie
DM-JunkJitsu by Teddie
DM-LostToMemory by Lord_Porksword
DM-NoEscapeSewers by ChrisHolden
DM-Reverie by Wormz
DM-Shine by Wail

Few weeks ago, a community project was started to build the next Unreal Tournament using the powerful UE4 since there was nothing at the horizon from Epic. The project was called Open Tournament :). Therefore, Open Tournament project gets discontinued since Epic new Unreal Tournament as been announced.

Development of Unreal Tournament for PC, Mac and Linux begins May 8th, in the open, between Epic, Unreal Engine 4 developers, modders and the community. The game will be totally free. In the video below, meet a few of the folks at Epic who are kicking off the collaboration !

Another awesome news, Michiel van den Bos was one of the two main composers for the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament. He was contacted asking him to get involved, due to the announcement of the new UT. He made a post in the forums. I’m a big fan of all the music tracks that came with the games and I’ll be more than happy if the new UT include stuff from him 😀