Post
Building A PvE 1-5 Player Fortnite Map
TLDR: Is it good? I wouldn't say that. Is it buggy? Yeah. Was it fun to make tho? For sure.
How It Started
It started out pretty innocently. My youngest brother's kids started playing fortnite, so my brother thought maybe we all should play it.
We did. I was terrible.
That in and of itself was fine... I didn't care that much... but I did find myself looking at a few youtube vids for tips, and then I saw that people had custom 'training' maps... which pretty much opened the rabbit hole for me.
I learned that fortnite has a version of unreal editor specifically for the game, and that epic games is also workign on a programming language for it called 'verse'. This intrigued me enough that I decided to dig into it all.
Then I got laid off at work.
Now I had both time and interest. After watching some videos, trying to understand how everything works, I decided to just start following some tutorials and see how far I could get.
This was how far I got:
https://www.fortnite.com/@jimjitsu/0589-0367-6428
Island code: 0589-0367-6428
The goal: Make a 1 to 5 player PvE (player vs. environment) fortnite map that would allow me to play with both of my brothers and both my brother's kids at the same time.
Full disclosure, I'd never made game before aside from some very weird text only adventure games on a TI-85 calculator in highschool, so I was pretty much going in blind. I hadn't used UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite) before, and I had no experience with the verse language. Also, both UEFN and verse itself are both in beta.
What I can say about it:
Pros:
- Very fun learning how to setup props and devices
- The first time you drop or spawn into your island is pretty awesome
- Fortnite does have a lot of documentation on everything
- The AI assistant did help quite a bit with basic verse code scaffolding
Cons:
- Not very intuitive at all
- Very easy to put bugs in your game just by not knowing what settings on various devices do
- Scope creep is very real even in personal projects
All in all, it was a blast to make, even if at multiple times I was in WAY over my head.
The general premise I eventually came to, was to have a section of the map where everyone on the team could spawn in, hopefully have a way to funnel them towards some kind of location, then set in motion some objectives, and once the objectives were achieved, have a final showdown/event that would need to be completed to show a victory banner.