Fortnite: Save the World

Company:

Hardsuit Labs

Game:

3rd Person PvE Co-op Looter Shooter

Engine:

Unreal 5

Role:

Senior Level Designer

Platforms:

Responsibilities:

  • Contributed to several content releases by implementing level blockouts, objectives, loot placement, and set dressing of The Lab dungeon

  • Owned the design and implementation from conception for the Brawl of The Wild Questline in a live game 

  • Gathered feedback from team during playtests to help identify improvements

  • Created documentation to outline common workflows and troubleshooting for common Fortnite: Save the World Content

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox X

The Lab Dungeon

Summary:

The Lab Dungeon was the 5th dungeon in the game but the first piece of new content that Hardsuit Labs worked on for Epic. This was not only an opportunity to make something great for the community but also our shot to impress Epic with what we could do. While we didn’t have any art support we were allowed to use assets that already existed as long as they didn’t belong to non-Epic IPs. This worked out in our favor as we needed to ship it in only a few months. Like all dungeons it needed a boss, traps, randomized enemy spawns, and lots of loot.

Responsibilities:

  • Iterated on the Dungeon blockout

  • Implemented loot, enemy spawners, objectives, and traps

  • Gathered playtest feedback

  • Mentored other designers with regard to workflow and design

  • Figured out how dungeons were made by reverse engineering other dungeons and speaking with Epic developers

Brawl of the Wild Questline

Summary:

A new feature called Wildlife was to be released and to introduce it to the community we needed a new questline. We were under a short timeline so it needed to re-use existing mission types while also teaching some new mechanics related to wildlife. Like all other quests it also needed new VO and rewards.

Responsibilities:

  • Iterated on several quest ideas and worked with the Lead Designer to find the best ones

  • Implemented all aspects of the questline

  • Worked with writers on the quest VO

  • Collaborated with other departments to gather required assets such as quest icons

Workflow Documentation

Summary:

Something we ran into was a severe lack of documentation on how to build content and utilize the tools. When possible we could reach out to Epic developers but often this legacy knowledge was lost when developers left. We were a small team and knew if we did nothing that this problem would appear again and again. As we worked on new content we would also create documentation on how that content should be made. In addition we created outlines for good workflows in the engine and troubleshooting steps when problems would arise.

Responsibilities:

  • Wrote several documents on content creation, workflows, and troubleshooting options.

    • This documentation is still in use.

  • Created images, gifs, and videos to help communicate steps

  • Built a tool with the Blueprint Utility Widget system that made it easier to evaluate the types of treasure in a Dungeon

    • The tool is still in use.