Half-Life indie modders turn to UDK

Indie startup Team Chivalry is using Epic Games’ Unreal Development Kit to create its newest project, a Joystiq report has revealed.

The group is now hunting for alpha testers for its new title, Chivalry: Battle for Agatha, after gaining positive attention from previous mod projects.

Team Chivalry broke onto the scene with Age of Chivalry, a popular Half-Life 2 mod built on Valve’s source engine.

Epic’s Unreal Development Kit is offered out to studios at no charge, though developers using it in a commercial capacity will have to pay Epic $99 up-front.

The engine vendor will also take 25 per cent of revenues from games built with the engine. The first $5,000 earned by a developer is however free of charge.

The UDK itself, downloaded for free from the company’s website, has proved to be remarkably popular with the PC indie and mod scene. The engine was downloaded over 50,000 times in its first week of release.