Are you a student (aged 13 or older) with a .edu email address? If so, you’re likely to love the freebies that GitHub is currently (at the time of writing this post) offering. Unreal Engine 4 SDK access for free (usually $19 per month) is just one of the products offered. Other goodies include: $100 DigitalOcean credit, free .me domain name, free SSL certificate, free DNS management, free Bitnami business 3 access, GitHub account upgraded to ‘Micro’ – enabling private repositories and no transaction fees for the first $1,000 in revenue on Stripe. There are a bunch more offers from DNSimple, Hackhands, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Travis CI and CrowdFlower. The link you need to gain access to all these is at the bottom of this post – don’t worry, there’s plenty of images to hold your attention. The best part; it’s all free – and we don’t ask for any of your information for pointing you in the direction of some great free stuff!
The Unreal Engine is a video game engine that first showed up in 1998 in the classic First-Person Shooter game, Unreal, released by Epic Games. The particular engine you’re granted access to with the Student Pack is Unreal Engine 4 which was available from March 2014. Since it is relatively new, there aren’t really any notable big games that have been released using the engine, but there’s certainly a lot of big name companies and indeed, eagerly awaited sequels to already massive game series – as well as new titles, including, but by no means limited to: Kingdom Hearts III, Tekken 7, Fable Legends, Dead Island 2, Project Stealth and of course, Unreal Tournament.
There are plenty of small group game developers or individuals making names for themselves by creating awesome games out of pre-existing game engines. At the very worst, you will have gained some programming or game developing experience that you can take with you into other projects in future.
Unreal Engine 4 is a multi-platform game engine, meaning anything you create can be ported to run on Windows, Linux, OS X, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, HTML5 (browsers), iOS and Android. That means if your creation is a huge success you’ll have a head start in getting it out to the masses on nearly every major gaming platform in current circulation.
So, you’ve got nothing to lose. Check out the Unreal Engine 4 SDK if you’re interested, otherwise, enjoy the array of other offers on the GitHub promotion!