Responsibilities:
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Level Designed and optimized a massive open world with 19 POI's, 16 minibosses, 4 dungeons and more.
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Quest Designed and scripted 30+ quests and 32 achievements
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Pitched and produced development over a year as a product manager.
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Developed art style and lighting.
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Made optimized VFX for Environment and Boss Attacks.
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Wrote all text and localized game for 5 different languages.
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Currently running live ops and community management.
Summary
Fort Souls: Boss Fight 🐉 is my biggest project to date, it's a UEFN map I created over the course of a year with my dev partner Sun Pirate. It's a large open world Boss Fight RPG map set in a Souls themed world.
Results
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672,000 Plays
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115 million Impressions
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Featured on the Fortnite homepage by Epic Games for innovation and creativity.
Duration
July 2024 - Present
Team Size
2
Final Performance Stats
Designing the Game Loop
The primary game loop revolves around fighting a Dragon Boss every 8-10 minutes and In between that time players are encouraged through quests and sightlines to explore the open world of Ashvale.
My design goal was to attract players to the game with a unique boss fight but make them stay for the unique open world and progression systems.
Between quests and multiple different types of POI's, players always have something new to explore on within sight line.
Onboarding through Quest Design
In the first 5 minutes of the game, I ensure players understand the minimum features of fighting PVE enemies, the Bossfight, and engaging with the reward loop, through an onboarding quest.
While the map has 3-5x as many features as I initially onboard for them. I find it important not to overwhelm players at the start and allowing them to explore and engage with the rest of the game at their own pace.
In addition to the boss fight I designed two unique events that take place as gameplay progresses.
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The Blood Moon: The Blood moon happens every 30 minutes in game, the sky blots out an evil red, and a dark moon rises, causing a moodier atmosphere and increased reward gain for 4 minutes.
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Horde Event: Horde event's are player started events that cause waves of custom enemies to spawn leading to a second boss fight with "the Arachnid"
Events
After initial release we've done lots of updates with stabilization and content running biweekly updates. Introducing new quests, characters, and rewards.
We've also been utilizing our discord server to drive and communicate with our community. Providing support, gathering feedback and hosting events and give aways.
Live Ops and Community Engagement
Level Design
The map is structured starting players at Fire Keeper's shrine, a hub that carries all progression mechanics, ensuring players return here and engage in a reward loop after completing activities.
The core part of the map with the highest foot traffic is the distance between the Shrine and The Dragon altar where players are encouraged to farm enemies, while waiting for the Boss to respawn. It has the highest spawn count of any area and also opens up to other areas as well.
The rest of the map is broken up into POI's and mini biomes that tell environmental storytelling with crumbling over grown visuals and guardians (minibosses) just as wearied.
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Quest Design Continued
After the onboarding quests, players are opened up to a larger randomly selected quest list of activities and places to visit in Ashvale to encourage areas they might be less likely to stumble into.
Larger challenges are also presented on the challenge wall to give players goals to work towards and also show off in our community forums.
The Economy Design is based around 4 currencies. Gold, Diamonds, XP, and Resources that all play into each other a little bit.
Granted by various sources:
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Defeating Enemies
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Defeating Bosses and Mini bosses
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Opening Chests
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Completing Quests and Achievements
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Trading with Merchants
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Gambling Hall
Economy Design and Reward Loop
Inspiration and Theming
The largest inspiration for Fort Souls, is the "Crumbling Farum Azula" area in Elden Ring. A crumbling land in the clouds home to ancient dragons.
On the UEFN side of things, there had been a large boss fight player base for some time with games like Valhalla and Kraken Boss fight existing relatively uncompeted.
So I saw an eye catching theme and underserved market and I decided to enter the market.
