Designing Game Levels in Unreal Editor for Fortnite
Each of the gameboards was designed with the top-down camera in mind. The size of the UI, coupled with needing to keep everything in frame and not have the NPC appear too small, limited the maximum size of each gameboard. This meant the boards had to be about 4 by 6 tiles in size. Since the top-down camera made it difficult to see the NPC's orientation given their small size on the screen, an arrow graphic appears around the NPC whenever it stops moving.
There are three things to keep in mind in designing the boards:
- Keep it compact
- Introduce new concepts one by one
- Make players think
Although the 4x6 area was limiting, working within those constraints made sure boards never got out of hand, and players felt like they had a quick sense of progression through the game. Players should be able to look at the board and figure out a solution quickly, but given the nature of command input, they also need to think through the steps in their heads before hitting the execute button. The five boards were designed to start simple and introduce one new concept per board before wrapping up with board 5 as the final test.
| This board is completely linear and only asks the player to go in one direction with the “forward” command. This gives the player an extremely simple goal, as well as time to play with the different commands and see what they do. | Design for gameboard 1 in Verse Commander minigame |
| This board introduces turning, requiring the player to use both types of turn commands to pass the level. | Design for gameboard 2 in Verse Commander minigame |
| This board introduces obstacles in the form of barriers. Although the board is a loop, the path a player can take is linear due to the placement of the barriers. This forces the player to interact with the obstacle trigger, teaching them about barriers and how to pass them. This board also requires multiple execute commands, since the number of commands needed to pass is larger than the max command limit of the command queue. | Design for gameboard 3 in Verse Commander minigame |
| This board adds multiple barriers into the mix, requiring the player to take a path with a ton of turns to get to both obstacle triggers. The orange obstacle trigger had to be moved into a corner due to pathing issues with the NPC. | Design for gameboard 4 in Verse Commander minigame |
| This board is much like board 4 in that it has multiple triggers and requires a long, winding path. Issues with NPC navigation really limited the design of this board, since the NPC would often attempt to path around walls to get to the other side, breaking them off the gameboard grid. This design had to be reworked a few times and showcased some of the limitations of the current NPC navigatable API. | Design for gameboard 5 in Verse Commander minigame |
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