Fortnite is best known as a battle royale, a PvP game where dozens or even a hundred players drop into a map for free-for-all combat until one player is left standing. Fortnite, like its predecessors PUBG and H1Z1’s battle royale mode, takes cues from survival games. Players must scrounge around the map, or kill players, to find the tools they need to achieve victory. A battle royale has the potential for a quick development time, as most of the components are already present in other games, but each battle royale needs a new core mechanic or unique feature to stand out in such a crowded market. Read on for a high-level overview of the development process for a game like Fortnite, from concept to finished product.
1. Plan your game’s concept and features
Plan out your Fortnite-like game’s innovative concept and build in the key features that are consistent across the whole battle royale genre, including PvP multiplayer, a shrinking safe zone, and often a free-to-play business model. The genre has grown in popularity, so setting your game’s core concept apart from others is a necessity to convince players and publishers that the project is worthwhile.
Developers must know their target audience when first building the core concept. Bluehole developed PUBG by starting with global expansion in mind; its success wasn’t by accident. Bluehole persistently playtested, sent out copies to content creators for research, and aimed their game at a Western audience. Lead Chang Han Kim said that the team went for a grittier aesthetic because realistic military games are more appealing in a global market.
A new take on the moment-to-moment gameplay is often the starting point for creating unique battle royale mechanics. Designers think about whether shooter/racing game/stealth/puzzle rules work with a Battle Royale format. Chessarena.io asks the question, What if chess were a battle royale? Gameplay starts with basic chess movement, but adds twists that make it fit a battle royale experience. Players don’t move on turns but instead make moves on cooldown. Participants also have a choice of champion with different abilities such as bombs, spells, and movement buffs.
Fortnite’s meta-features are more universal and applicable to any battle royale project. Large-scale multiplayer fits well into the free-to-play business model, where high traffic is required to keep up revenue. Common features of the model include battle passes and daily login rewards, which encourage players to return regularly, and in-app purchases of cosmetics, XP boosters, and lootboxes. The system requires constant upkeep to feed new seasonal rewards into the ecosystem. To further increase engagement, Epic Games has continued to foster the community with Fortnite Creative and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, allowing users to create their own custom maps and content.
Creating a concept brief, and later a pitch deck, is a key step in the pre-production process. The brief summarizes the intended experience, listing the genre, target platforms, features, audience, and design pillars. A team without a concept brief doesn’t have a single source of truth for the direction of the project. When disagreements occur about whether a feature ought to go into the game or what sets the game apart from other battle royales, the team has a concept to point to when they resolve these problems.
2. Design core gameplay mechanics
Design core gameplay mechanics that encourage the player to take risky moves, which creates the tension that’s key in a battle royale. Mechanics are what the player interacts with to create a meaningful change in the game. The multiplayer networking, for example, isn’t a mechanic. It’s a crucial feature for a battle royale game, but it falls under the category of software engineering, not mechanics design. Common mechanics in battle royales like Fortnite include the choice of starting position at the beginning of a match, the mechanic used to eliminate other players, and looting the map to gain power.
Players choose where they start in Fortnite, but the choice isn’t entirely free. The Battle Bus that players fly in on picks a random vector across the map, forcing the players to make new choices each time they play. Fortnite’s competitor, PUBG, further constrains the players in the map Paramo. The map centers on a volcano which blocks access to certain parts of the map with flowing lava, which covers different parts of the island each match.
Playtesting is crucial to seeing whether the map correctly draws in and motivates players. When I worked with the team on ChessArena.io, we realized giving players reasons to take risks required more than just adding a shrinking arena. Players choose to hide until they’re forced into conflict, which isn’t ideal for an engaging multiplayer experience. Relying on negative reinforcement to guide players is a common mistake among new designers, and more experienced designers realize that people need positive attractors as well as negative repellers to keep the experience from getting stale.
Combat represents the next major set of mechanics in a battle royale game. A core component of Fortnite’s combat is that all players start on even footing, with access to the same weapons. Because the equipment is random, skill level has a smaller part to play. A new player has the chance to get ahead of other players by getting lucky and acquiring a power weapon early on.
Fortnite has third-person shooter combat, but any skill test is enough to form a core mechanic that the rest of the experience grows around. ChessArena.io has already been mentioned, and Tetris 99 is, well, a Tetris battle royale without any combat at all. Instead, clearing lines starts a timer for another player in the match. If the timer runs out without the player clearing any lines, garbage blocks fill up the bottom of the screen, bringing unlucky opponents closer to defeat.
The design goals shape the way the combat works, if combat is a core mechanic. Fortnite is meant to be more accessible, so recoil on weapons is low, time to kill is high, and faster movement makes the game more forgiving. A designer aiming at Fortnite’s audience isn’t going to create gameplay similar to PUBG, which targets a hardcore audience who wants a realistic experience that makes them feel tense and fearful.
Loot is another core component of a battle royale like Fortnite, given that it’s the way players grow in power as the match continues. The smaller the map gets, the more powerful enemies the player encounters. This increase in difficulty drives players to take risks in order to get more resources than their opponent. To ensure this pacing, the best loot is reserved for highly visible locations that draw many opponents in.
Loot benefits the player with increased damage, survivability, armor, weapons, consumables, and building materials. This list isn’t the limit of what loot does for the player, as sometimes the novelty of something entirely new like the grapple gun is a reward in itself, but it represents a few of the main categories. Competing experiences like Apex Legends add progression systems on top that allow the player to boost their armor just by earning kills.
A battle royale needs unique mechanics to stand out in such a crowded and popular genre, and Fortnite distinguishes itself by including building mechanics. Resources like wood, stone, and metal let players create structures with a durability equivalent to its material (wood is weakest, metal is strongest). This unique mechanic creates an easy-to-learn-hard-to-master experience, where novice players use the mechanic sparingly to create temporary fortresses, while advanced players lay down surfaces in quick succession to cross gaps, gain height, and block attacks.
Designing the mechanics starts with prototyping, as creating the next unique mechanic like building requires experimentation. A rapid prototype focuses on the newest or hardest to implement mechanics first. Indeed, everyone knows that a battle royale multiplayer shooter is doable, but a battle royale multiplayer shooter deck-builder with playable heroes and PvE elements (or whatever experience you’re building) is brand new. Test out the riskier mechanics first, because making changes early while the artwork is still default, blocky figures and the netcode hasn’t been refined is much easier than making changes later when many more systems will be affected.
3. Create 3D assets for characters, environments, and items
Create 3D assets for characters, environments, and items in close collaboration with the art team. Assets are the artwork that turns a game into a finished, polished product. Designers first decide what assets are necessary for the game, then begin meeting with the artists to create preliminary sketches. The teams go back and forth as the artists slowly bring the asset from concept to completion. Studios either complete the process in-house or outsource the work to external artists.
Artists in a studio walk away from initial meetings with designers to create a few sketches of the concept. Building on any sketches the designer has already prepared, the team creates multiple options for leadership to go over. Design and art leads review the work and come to a decision on the final concepts, which go back to the artists. Concepting in indie studios starts with 3D model blockouts in some cases to speed up the process, but the same process of communication and refinement applies.
The amount of cooperation between designers and the art team varies based on the scope of the design. An object with a proven workflow is easy to implement and requires less back-and-forth between designers and the artists (say, adding a new gun to the assault rifle lineup). However, when a new design requires features the engine doesn’t have already, the design team is going to spend most of its time with the art team to guide implementation. For example, when Morgan Day worked on the Kologarn and Deathwing fights back in my Blizzard days, he was building giant enemies which were able to grab the player in an engine where syncing animations with gameplay simply wasn’t done. This process required much more cooperation.
Asset creation is a deeply cooperative process in a studio, but solo development is a different matter. Asset stores online are a reasonable source of artwork when a single developer is dealing with coding, designing, packaging, marketing, and shipping the game. The Unity Asset store and the Fab marketplace are two of the most popular options, as they’re directly associated with the Unity and Unreal game engines respectively. Sources like itch.io have cheaper assets for 2D development as well. Otherwise, finding ways to add variety without more assets helps save the budget. PUBG, like Fortnite, uses a day/night cycle to add loads of visual variety to the same map.
4. Implement multiplayer networking
Implement multiplayer networking using Unreal Engine’s networking or third-party solutions for Unity like Photon. Unreal Engine is a natural choice since it’s Fortnite’s native engine. While Replication, Unreal Engine’s built-in solution, struggles with quick, responsive experiences like fighting games, the engine is designed just for battle royale. Epic Games didn’t even use level streaming for the first 6 months of Battle Royale. Unreal loaded the whole 2×2 km map on each client with great success.
Epic Games has pushed many changes to Unreal Engine to support Fortnite specifically, so it’s a reasonable option for getting large multiplayer games working. However, if using Unity, Photon has a number of networking solutions that are ready to handle multiplayer for a variety of game types, including battle royale.
The major hurdle with implementing multiplayer networking isn’t the choice of engine, but testing the networking, paying for server space, and maintaining multiplayer service. Brendan Greene, creator of PUBG, ran into server issues multiple times. Pre-PUBG, Brendan was funding the servers for his original battle royale mod with his welfare checks. Even after finding a job at Bluehole, he had to rush to upgrade his servers soon after PUBG’s release, since player traffic exceeded the expected 2 million players.
5. Test the game extensively for bugs and performance
Test the game extensively for bugs and performance as soon as the game is fun to play. Designers work together with QA to optimize the game, identifying points where systems are able to be trimmed down. Both Unreal and Unity come with solutions for testing and fixing issues with performance.
A battle royale game like Fortnite has countless failure points, many of which are unacceptable even for playtesting. The better part of 100 players are together on a single map, and each player’s able to affect the environment by building structures and looting. Epic Games needed to revamp the way level streaming worked in Unreal Engine to make sure Fortnite was sustainable in the long term.
Lots of edge cases are likely to crop up that the development team wants to identify during playtesting. Say the programmers create what they think is an airtight algorithm for making sure the client deloads distant players. If all the players drop into the same location at the start of the match, the programmers’ hard work becomes useless.
Established engines like Unreal and Unity have profilers and solutions for making sure the game runs smoothly. Unity’s Stats screen shows basic information about the framerate, number of vertices in the scene, and number of batch calls (when the computer sends new geometry to the GPU). For more detail, the Unity Profiler breaks down the CPU, GPU, and memory usage for each frame.
Unreal Engine has advanced profiling and optimization tools for those knowledgeable about modern GPUs. Unreal includes similar profiling tools to Unity along with new features built for battle royale. Epic developed the Significance Manager for Fortnite due to constraints caused by releasing on mobile and streaming a large level in multiplayer. The Significance Manager is an empty framework that gives each asset a rating based on how close they’re to the player and whether they’re within view. The advantage of this system is that it works even if 100 players drop in at the same point. If the engine doesn’t rate objects in the scene and instead only uses distance, the game will still render all 100 players at full detail because they’re closeby.
How long does it take to make a game like Fortnite?
It takes less than two years to create a game like Fortnite with an experienced team, although a brand new experience is likely to take longer. Estimating the development time is a challenge when none of the three biggest battle royale titles began from scratch. PUBG was created by an experienced modder who made battle royale experiences for DayZ and Arma III. Fortnite was built on the foundation of an existing game, Fortnite Save the World. Apex Legends was a shooter built with the same technology and in the same world as Respawn Entertainment’s other IP, Titanfall. Still, the development stories of PUBG and Fortnite show how getting ahead of the curve through frequent iteration has the potential for big success.
PUBG’s development cycle was relatively short, spending about 7 months of development in early access. The leadership at Bluehole wanted to playtest and iterate quickly. The game started pre-production in early 2016, when the producers flew PlayerUnknown to South Korea to discuss a collaboration. The producers already had the intention to enter early access in a year, and they did so almost exactly a year later in March 2017.
Fortnite Battle Royale’s development cycle was even quicker than PUBG’s, showing how simple implementing a battle royale over an existing codebase really is. The original version of Fortnite, which wasn’t a battle royale at all, released in July 2017 under the title Fortnite Save the World. Fortnite Save the World was originally announced in 2011, but the release of Unreal Engine 4, involvement of Tencent in Epic Games, and movement of the project from studio to studio delayed it for years. The game released in early access in summer 2017; by September, after 12 weeks of work, Epic released the Battle Royale mode to capitalize on the trend set by PUBG.
