Wow! The Y-Project was a strange project! It was on of the first games to use the Unreal Engine 2.x in Europe at all. It was meant to be a Deus Ex killer (man, what a joke thinking back). And I learned a lot during my rather short time at Westka.
We had a big budget and a really cool engine, but no experience nor some proper planning. It was chaos and aimless from day one. After two or three weeks I got promoted to team lead. But that didn't help very much. Any effort to get this in any achievable direction was shot down instantly. The few experienced people got pretty annoyed very soon. We spent money on absolutely stupid things like an architect telling the level designers how to light or build levels. We invested in technical stuff like bumbmaps while most of the engine features lay barren. We created content like hell without any idea what to create with it.
Still, the demo and some assets where so impressive, that we got part of the Epic presentation on E3. We even got visited by Mark Rein, because he was so impressed with our assets and technical achivements. He showed us Unreal Tournament and got really pissed as he recognized we were not very impressed of their game.
Of course the game got never released or anywhere near something you could really call a game or play. But I learned a lot about asset creation, textures, Unreal and not to trust people that tell you everything is possible and in reach.
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More informations cooming soon!
