Making it in Unreal: Plastic turns a real-life backyard into an open world

Give teenagers an FPS with a toolset and you can count on them to start designing levels based on environments from their own lives. It was the source of no small moral panic in the ‘90s, when Doom levels were traded under the noses of parents, and Sean McAlister was doing the same a generation later with Halo 2. “The PC beta had a map editor that came with it, and they allowed you to make completely custom maps,” McAlister tells us. “Back when I was 15, I made a map of my backyard in the game. It was just fun to drive around it and see that familiar location in a different context.” McAlister grew up and joined the army. But one day, while lying in the long grass at Fort Knox in Kentucky waiting for training to resume, he found himself thinking of his backyard again. “I remembered setting up these little plastic army guys with other toys, playing out scenarios, and just using my imagination,” he says. “And I guess we lose that as we get older, a little bit. We don’t have that kind of downtime, and that boredom brings out the best of your imagination. I thought it would be an interesting idea for a game.” What began as a Homeward Bound-esque single-player campaign that would take players through McAlister’s childhood backyard is now an open-world game named Plastic. It’s set between the sandcastles and plastic brick settlements of a real-life, if reimagined, location.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2scMo96