For the first major post-launch update, I owned all of the open-world encounters spawning on the brand new Star Wars Island. The first piece of content I implemented for this initiative was the Lightsaber Training Droid.
In terms of gameplay, this was primarily an updated version of the Rift Butterfly I shipped for the MVP release of Lego Fortnite. This version however involved a lot of custom scripting to get the Lightsaber Training Droid to move in a way that was authentic to the Star Wars films.
I spent hours combing over footage of the Lightsaber Training Droid from the original Star Wars, doing my best to match the rotations, the erratic movements, as well as its cadence and timing.
Given how small and hard to spot this little droid is, I decided to implement the behavior where it fires laser bolts in random directions after it gets a reasonable distance ahead of the player. That was designed to help players from losing sight of the droid if it got too far ahead or if players got distracted by enemies or resources while following the droid.
I also began delving into POI encounter design for the first time for the Star Wars update. This included spawning friendly Rebel soldiers patrolling inside and outside the cave players use to transition from their original island to Star Wars island. I also designed and implemented combat encounters against Storm Troopers and Officers at POI's found scattered around Star Wars Island. Learning a new suite of tools to support working on POI's was both challenging and rewarding.
The Rift Shrine was my attempt to make a simple, reusable system for asking players to give up a defined number of a specific resource in exchange for a positive outcome. Some of these appear out in the open and summon a simple combat encounter players can complete for a reward. Others are used to remove an immovable boulder that blocks the entrance to a rare cave filled with valuable resources.
I worked hard to make Rift Shrines as flexible as possible, so they could be reused in later updates if need be. I also spent many cycles iterating on all the visual feedback designed to diegetically inform players of the state of the Rift Shrine: how many items have been deposited, what specific item is required, whether the Shrine has been discovered already or not, whether the Shrine has been completed outright. It was important to me that players could see these from a distance and identify all of this information without needing to interact and inspect a UI screen.
These POI's with Golems hiding was super fun to work on. The core idea was to hide the actual Golem mini-boss. Then when the player approaches the POI and attempts to collect their reward, it pops out of the ground to surprise the player and the fight begins in earnest.
I put a lot of care into making sure players could be surprised by this each time it was encountered, since this POI was to be reused multiple times in player's worlds. I accomplished this by placing a set number of potential spawn points, picking the Golem's spawn point from them at random, and filling in the rest with static golem heads. At runtime, the first time the player loads one of these POI's into relevancy, we select how many static heads to spawn in and where the real Golem will spawn. The design goal here was to keep players on their toes, and not allow them to identify ahead of time where the real Golem had actually spawned in.
At the end of 2024, Lego Fortnite relaunched as Lego Fortnite Odyssey. For this release, I designed and implemented a brand new FTUE. From a progression systems standpoint, the game was undergoing a huge change in how we ask players to craft weapons and "level up" through the game's tech tree.
The goals of the new FTUE were the following:
- Teach players the basics of what they need to survive.
- Give them an opportunity to engage with the Component Based Crafting system.
- Get players through the FTUE and onto the big, new adventure the team shipped for the Odyssey update as quickly as possible.
- Don't ask players to build or craft so much in this village that they get attached to it. Encourage players to learn what they need to and then leave this village behind.
- Give them an opportunity to engage with the Component Based Crafting system.
- Get players through the FTUE and onto the big, new adventure the team shipped for the Odyssey update as quickly as possible.
- Don't ask players to build or craft so much in this village that they get attached to it. Encourage players to learn what they need to and then leave this village behind.