I was CTO and lead developer at a very small startup making a game in UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite). The project was closed after release. I’m writing a short postmortem in case it helps anyone planning a launch, on Fortnite or any other platform.

What we did

We went for one big, highly polished first project: custom systems, polish, optimization. The assumption was that a really polished game would have a strong release.

What happened

The game didn’t get the reach it needed after launch, and the investors decided to close the project.

What I’d argued for

A smaller first release, so we could learn how discovery and marketing actually work in Fortnite, with more of the budget held back for marketing. What I think about most now is the order of things. We spent the big budget before we’d run the cheap test of whether players would find us.

A technical problem I’m still happy with

We were running short on memory because of how many gas stations we had placed as devices. We replaced them with a 3D model and built a fully custom car repair system in the neutral zone. That solved the memory problem. Happy to go into more detail if anyone is hitting similar limits.

What I do differently now

I work as a producer and delivery manager these days. Before any big build, I want to know what we’re trying to learn from the first release and how much budget stays untouched for getting the game seen.

For people who’ve shipped on any platform: how do you test discoverability before committing a full budget?

TL;DR: We polished heavily, launched with little reach, and the project was closed. Next time I’d ship something small first, learn how discovery works, and keep real budget for marketing.

map is "HORROR RED VS BLUE" by nuke-ffa-1v1. Nearly 600 active players at the time of posting this, I can't image how many people have accidentally wasted their money on this garbage.

In my creative island, these random walls that can't be moved by the phone tool keep appearing in the same spot in my island. I can delete them, but when I load out of my island and back in, they come back. I tried restarting my game and copying the world, but nothing worked.

Does anyone know how to fix this? Is my island corrupted?

1. ⁠Loot-pool Device: The loot-pool device looks like a regular battle Royale chest but allows you to throw weapons and items into it. When thrown in you can tweak the chances of them dropping when opened in game. Weapons, items, materials, and such will be sorted into separate categories to customize, that way you can get sheilds, a shotgun, and 50 wood from one chest. This would help make loot-pools for battle Royale creative maps without the hassle.

2. ⁠Weapon Tweaker Device: With this device you can toss a weapon into it, upon opening the device you can tweak that weapon’s stats, such as the damage it does, headshot multipliers or damage, and damage to other wildlife or creatures. You can also tweak damage drop off ranges, magazine size, and reload time. This would allow for certain maps to give guns their OG damage numbers if that’s the goal they’re making, or to possibly nerf a gun down for their map.

Someone can literally just end the whole fucking game if they get pissed off you killed them. Now I have to go back to lobby get everyone to ready up all over again. Just because YOU died doesn't mean you should have the ability to END IT for everyone. I kid you not, load in, game starts, I kill someone, it ends instantly and we all have to go back to lobby and ready up!!! WHY!!!!

i recreated relentless retreats vault in creative 1.0 i tried making it as accurate as possible!

and i wanna know what everyone thinks