As regular viewers will know, I've spent the last 4 months or so rehabilitating my brain, having been zombied by chemotherapy, by learning UEFN and Verse to make a brawler game called "Bonk!".
My brain seems to be firing on all cylinders again, so I decided to review the project. It's obvious my brain was fried - I'd started by jumping in with both feet, not even bothering to take a good look at Fortnite, its indie game offerings, the gameplay, weapons, pickups, economy, history, nothing. I just wanted to make the game in my head, which I later learned to be quite similar to "Arms" on the Switch.
Anyway, the game went through many, many iterations, with Claude assisting along the way. There's lots of redundant assets in there, lots of redundant code, and thanks to Claude what code is in there is drowning in a sea of GenAI comments.
Meanwhile, Epic have been pressing on with their Scenegraph implementation, to the point now where I feel it's not insanity to use it in production.
So with all that in mind, I've decided to start again.
I've got a much better appreciation of Fortnite now, I know what I'm doing with UEFN, and something that surprised me was just how rewarding making stuff is first-hand, rather than asking a machine to make it for you; and in doing that I've discovered (somewhat unsurprisingly) what a pile of poo the old codebase was.
With freedom comes choices, and that's where my dilemmas lie. Here's the first one: The game has had many, many GUIs. Currently the lobby looks like this:
Up to 10 players appear in the lobby, and there's 3 game types to choose from. Each player gets to vote on which map to play (the number by the tick icon), there's info on how long each round lasts, the minimum amount of players, but curiously no indication on how many rounds there are.... A timer counts down, and when that reaches zero the map with the most votes is played.
It's all very 2D, all very traditional. Now I'm thinking that's not what Fortnite players want. Maybe they want a 3D environment they can wander around, where they stand on a pad or something to vote for a level. Players can stand around and chat, then decide which level to play; or they can visit the shop, practice shooting (the game doesn't use FN weaponry), bounce on trampolines and other things they'll encounter in a game.
What do you think?
Answers on a postcard....