The setting was a far-flung galaxy where man was struggling to survive in the harshest of climates. In the limitless bounds of space man encounters the engimatic and divided Dracille, along with the savage and terrible Gath.The three races are at ends with eachother over a rare and valuable fuel source known as "Zionite", which is how all faster-than-light engines are powered. The full game was designed to have an RTS element to it, with one player on each team controlling a mothership and sending drones out to harvest Zionite. Meanwhile the players contend for the open space, with the goal of destroying the enemy mothership.
The game was modded using UT2004 as the base. While a space fighter level existed in the assault gametype of the retail release, it was not sufficient for our needs. Zionite Wars implemented a target camera in the UI, as well as user-rotated shielding and 3 missile types. We also created 6 flyable craft across two races. I myself implemented four maps, two mission based ones, and two team dogfight ones.
There were many inherent issues with using the Unreal engine in this manner. Attaching mission objectives to movers, for example was impossible, which hampered the mission-based maps greatly. All the same, we are quite proud of the work we accomplished and were pleased to receive an honorable mention for our submission during the final phase of the Make Something Unreal Contest hosted by Epic and Nvidia.
