D&D BattleMap Using the UDK

If you've come here from the YouTube videos, then you know what this is about.  If not, let me give you some background.  I'm sure many D&D DMs reach the same conclusion we did: battlemaps are difficult to make interesting.

• Wet erase vinyl maps require some time and artistic talent to be more than just room-defining walls.  Plus, you can't really prepare them beforehand if the evening's adventure will be in more than one location.
• Scanning maps from a module, scaling, printing, cutting and taping uses up a lot of material that gets thrown away at the end of the evening.
• Dungeon tiles are great if the adventure you are running used them.  Otherwise, they can be clunky to try to fit together to match your design.

Which left us with various digital map tools.  But if we're sitting around the table with laptops staring at a networked map, we loose the immersion of using the miniatures.  (More on that later.)

It was during this period of battlemap exploration that we came across the UDK.  We're a group of IT industry professionals who play D&D.  Surely, we could spend some of our gaming time creating our own game, right?  But what game to make?  Soon afterward, Alien Swarm entered the picture and we had our epiphany: if we made a top-down game, why couldn't we just overlay that with a grid and have a fully animated, realistic, 3D battlemap?

Well, we did.  And came up with this:

The next blog will talk about our setup and how we actually use it to play.  Then we'll explain the code we wrote to build it.  Until then, check out some of the other videos.  We're kinda proud of them.  :)

D&D BattleMap Using the UDK - The Setup