Fortnite
Role: Weapons / Hero Designer
Software: UE4
Team Size: 4 - 10
Development Cycle: 1 - 2 month cycles
I've had the opportunity to create content for both Battle Royale and Save the World! At a high level I:
- Developed LTMs, and tournaments for popular content creators
- Helped work on multiple items in BR like the Revive Grenade and the Flight-Knock pistol
- Created the bow weapon archetype
- Implemented seasonal modifiers
- Contributed to the core game loop on unannounced work
- Worked directly with Epic on design decisions
Battle Royale
Part of my work on BR focused on creating LTMs (Limited Time Modes). These take the core identity of a battle royale and put a spin in it, such as weapons deal knockback instead of damage, a tournament style match-up with curated weapon loadouts, or a spin on the "protect the president" mode. My duties included:
- Utilize the Gameplay Ability System in Blueprints for various scripting needs
- Curate loot tables and their weights via spreadsheets
- Setup hotfixable gamedata values
- Devise specialized weapon loadouts using existing weapons, consumables, and items
- Coordinate with other disciplines on design needs
- Script / fix bugs with client & server replication in mind
While each LTM presented itself with it's own unique challenges, one thing I always brought to the table was the mindset of both Hardcore and Casual Fortnite players. They're two very different playerbases that have different skill sets and wants / needs. I made sure to facilitate design discussions where I brought in POVs from both sides as I was one of the designers more in tune with how hardcore players played.
A subset of the LTM work was to develop tournaments for big Fortnite content creators such as Lachlan and Lazarbeam. For the Lazarbeam tournament in particular I helped shape the mode's identity by owning the loot table changes as well as creating the main attraction: the Flight-Knock pistol. I realized that If I made the knock-back strong enough, you could finish the weapon's reload and shoot again while still in the air, therefore creating air battling. This ended up being an integral part to the meta of the tournament, while also creating hilarious and awestruck moments.
Save The World
Most of my work on STW focused on creating weapons / hero content for each content drop. Most of my work involved utilizing the UE4 Gameplay Ability System Blueprint scripting to accomplish my tasks. Those included:
- Own the creation of all 11 weapon set bows from start to completion
- Create and balance hero / weapon perks
- Sort out art / audio asset requests ahead of time
- Kitbash VFX approved by the art director
- Coordinate with other disciplines on design needs
As there was only one bow in the game, I took the opportunity to experiment with interesting ways to make each of the new bows feel unique. A lot of weapons in other weapon archetypes all feel the same to play with, and most utilize a standard critical damage and critical chance perk setup. Breaking away from the standard meta would create a plethora of new fun toys for players to play with.
This led to the creation of bows that, to name of a few of their functionalities: spawn homing arrows, cause lightning to bounce around between enemies, stun any enemy for a long duration but breaks on weapon damage, debuff the target so all party members deal increased damage to it, leave behind delayed explosive powder kegs, and even fire a projectile that pierces through anything and everything!
Vindertech Seeker, Vacuum Tube Bow, and Xenon Bow
The Instigator, Love Song, and Powder Keg
The other portion of my STW work was to be the sole developer for the last half of the Venture modifiers: Super Heroic, Escalation, and Super Husks. These serve as changes to the base game that players have to deal with in every mission they played during the season. Once the season ends, the modifier is no longer active. I worked directly with the lead Epic designer responsible for STW's vision, brainstorming ideas and identifying solutions to design problems for additional modifiers. The goal of these are to change the way the player plays and shake up the meta by challenging players to think up new ways to build their character layout of weapons, heroes, hero perks, and traps.
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Super Heroic leaned into each of the 3 class' playstyles, buffing each of their strengths through the roof. This created brand new character builds that never would have been viable otherwise.
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Escalation has players maintaining killstreaks to trigger continuously better AOE elemental effects at specific thresholds. Timing of when and where to trigger them is key to succeeding each mission.
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Super Husks buffs each of the 3 types of enemies, leaning into each of their strengths even more. To offset this, each enemy types has a weakness as well as the opportunity to drop quality loot for the player on death. This changed the way players had to engage in enemy encounters by making dynamic target priority dependent on which husk type and how many of their type is active instead of just AOEing everything down.
The Escalation modifier was one of my favorites to design because of how much player agency it created. I wanted each consecutive threshold to trigger a stronger AOE as that helped encourage the gameloop of trying to maintain a kill streak.
Initially each AOE dealt damage in addition to the elemental effect in a small radius. During iteration I realized two problems: things were dying too quickly for the elemental effects to have any real impact, and it was sometimes difficult to hit enemies if you were using longer ranged weapons. I ended up reducing the damage and instead cranked up the AOE radius. This greatly increased the ease of ensuring enemies were hit when you reached a threshold, and allowed for character builds that benefit from crowd control even more so. Plus, seeing 20+ husks stunned, frozen, or dancing looked awesome!