Unreal Editor for Fortnite
Fortnite has a creative marketplace for different games. At Mighty Bear Games I was the lead designer/team lead on that project for about 9 months where we created a new Fortnite game/map once a week.
Our most successful game, with it reaching about 7,707 concurrent users at its peak.
Working on Fortnite was fast and frenetic.
When we worked on Fortnite, we were creating a new map a week. You can check out all the maps over at https://fortnite.gg/creative?creator=legitco, and it was a very interesting design process as we had to ideate and ship extremely quickly.
Working in such a small team was a good experience, I hadn’t lead such a small team before (5 people) and it was refreshing that things could get done so quickly. Designs + iterations would be done within 3 days, the last 2 days in a week for polishing and just making sure the game worked as intended.
If anything needed to be changed, it was a simple process of just chatting with the engineers directly, extremely different from working in a big team where such changes might take up to a week.
Market Research
The popular maps on the Fortnite marketplace changed daily. A ton of time was spent looking at the designs of what other games were doing, what memes were trending, what was popular in the cultural zeitgeist.
It was imperative that we had a good theme for each of our maps because, just like Youtube, the thumbnail was one of the biggest draws for players to play the game, and that initial burst of players would in turn entice more players to play the game as more popular games were displayed to more people.
