Making it in Unreal: when Halo met Portal in Splitgate: Arena Warfare

Halo, plus Portal. The constant motion and killstreak ecstacy of Bungie’s multiplayer shooter, spliced with the unpredictable physics genius of Valve’s puzzle smash. It’s the combined gaming concept that would have captured the zeitgeist of the ‘00s, neatly packaging the decade’s high points into a single executable. Except it didn’t happen in the ‘00s. It nearly didn’t happen in the ‘10s, either - until Splitgate: Arena Warfare came along. The question is: why not? “That’s something we’ve asked ourselves,” 1047 Games co-founder Ian Proulx tells us. “From an indie perspective, the reason it hasn’t happened before is because it’s just really hard.” Nonetheless, it’s a challenge these indies are throwing themselves into, rather like an Aperture Science tester. 1047, it turns out, is the number of a dorm room where two Standford students of computer science experimented with putting portals into an FPS for a project demo. Now, 30 people are working on a commercial game based on that concept, grappling with the strange maths involved in making Splitgate happen in Unreal Engine 4.