Let’s tune in to Patchwork! In this Ask Epic Anything AMA, we’ll be talking about new devices in Fortnite Creative and UEFN for creating music and rhythmic gameplay. You can read more about Patchwork HERE.
Submit your questions directly to expert members of our team, ask about feature insights, overarching development guidance, career advice, industry questions, and of course, what you’re wondering specifically about Patchwork!
Make sure to check out the backgrounds and expertise of our special Patchwork developer guests featured below.
Do you have a question for us? Ask away by replying to this post! Please see the rules below for posting your questions.
Jonathan Mintz / Senior Designer
Jonathan is a game designer with over 20 years of experience, and joined Epic Games in 2021 via the Harmonix acquisition. As the design lead for Patchwork, Jonathan has been working to continue the Harmonix mission of inventing new ways for non-musicians to experience the joy of making music.
Jamie McKiernan / Associate Art Director
Jamie has been creating art for games for the past 13 years, and joined Epic Games in 2021 via the Harmonix Acquisition. She is currently the art lead on Patchwork, and works with a team that has a focus on creating art that can support an expanding system of devices. Our goal is to create a timeless design that showcases the flow of audio through the system.
Brad Fotsch / Senior Designer
Brad has been creating games for almost 20 years and joined the Harmonix team at Epic in 2022. He is part of the design team that created Patchwork and focuses on making tools that balance accessibility with power.
Ryan Challinor / Principal Designer
Ryan joined Epic Games in 2021 as a part of the Harmonix acquisition. He’s been with Harmonix for 15 years as both an engineer and designer. Ryan is focused on music, audio, gameplay feel, interface, and rapid development.
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Does Epic plan to offer a calibration method to patchwork in the near future allowing creators to give players a solution to equalize Input, Audio and Screen Latency? If this is not via a separate patchwork device, will a solution be added in the main Fortnite user settings?
From experience I know this is a very complex area, especially when Fortnite is not a game optimized for audio/input/visual synchronization. There is also network and packet priority/ordering to take into account etc. Can we expect at some point a setting within the creative island settings to choose the overall optimization to use in an island experience? For example between Building/FPS or Audio/Input/Screen synchronization within the low level coding of Fortnite so to speak?
This is a critical area when it comes to many audio based game experiences.
Similar to a question listed above, will there be more Patchwork-esque devices that we can interact with using the patchwork tool?
I noticed when I convert a Creative map to UEFN with Patchwork devices already in it, the devices will change the octave and the speed automatically without me doing anything to it and the result is kind of unsettling lol. Is there a fix for this currently being worked on?
We’ll be postponing this AMA until the new year to give creators more time to work with the tools. The team is eager to hear your thoughts and answer your questions!
In the meantime, we’ll be leaving this thread open as an ongoing thread for you to ask questions and get answers from the Patchwork developers.
I am not sure if this is the best way to reach out to the Patchwork Team. We are a small Unreal Engine Project Studio that are active in making games that are Music related. We also have a strong presence in Virtual Worlds especially related to Live Music Projects. Last year we published our first UE based game via Steam called my Music Oasis
This year we have been working in UE 5.3 and 5.4 developing a set of musical instruments, loopers, riffers, arpeggiators, etc on top of Metasounds. We have a UMG based interface that controls our modular synth that we just finished. We maintain an active Vlog/Playlist on Youtube called Developer Diaries that shows what we are up to. You might find what our deep dives into the same technical area you are in of some interest.
Our studio is mostly made up of “graying gamers” that are retired or semi-retired from their main careers. We call ourselves a Project Studio instead of a Game Studio because we are a not primarily interested in making money but instead we are exploring technologies and events associated with music and gaming.
All that being said we decided to start working in UEFN this year in addition to UE5 to see music possibilities and came across your truly excellent tools in your patchwork efforts. We would like to open dialogs with your team as we try to add our effort to the overall Fortnite Ecosystem. Our first project was trying to replicate some of what you show in Club Patchwork. So, the first technical question we have is would it be possible to hook our Visual Effects and Rave Lighting Devices we are building to the Note_Trigger Patchwork Device like you do in the Patchwork Club? We can see no way to subscribe to the notes being generated and listened to by your other devices.
Also we would love to help you in anyway we can as testers or to bounce community ideas off of. Thanks again for the work you have done. Is this the best way to communicate with you or is there a community Discord/Slack or other way to better have some dialogs between our teams.
