Blade Ball Fortnite

[Clebito]

Blade Ball Fortnite was inspired by a Roblox game with the same name (which, in turn, drew inspiration from an Overwatch 2 game mode) and was created as a 1-week project. (Code for anyone who wants to have fun: 1443-4058-4106)

The concept is pretty simple: Avoid the ball to survive and pickaxe it to deflect it towards another player. The last one standing wins. While the game itself is straightforward, its creation presented significant challenges.

Shock Maps

1. The first lesson we learned from previous projects was to create our own custom rounds. Using Fortnite’s built-in round system resulted in slower gameplay due to the loading times between rounds. After implementing our own custom rounds (with no spectating/loading times), we noticed a significant increase in playtime for our maps.

2. Now, onto programming: Setting a player as the ball’s target and changing the target when receiving damage was the easier part. The complications arose in addressing issues such as:

• What happens when a player quits in the middle of the game?
• What if the player who is the target dies while outside the arena?
• How can we make only the targeted player see the ball as red?
• How do we ensure super-fast ball transitions if the pickaxe has such a slow animation?

3. Addressing these issues proved challenging. To make a specific player see something different from others, we considered changing their class. However, the class selector device, even when set to 0.0 seconds for class changes, still took up to 1-2 seconds. To work around this, we assigned each player to a unique class (limiting the game to 16 players but it’s working for us). As for the pickaxe problem, we provided each player with a signal remote device to block the ball, reducing our reliance on pickaxe mechanics.

4. There were other struggles along the way, but after 1-2 full weeks, we had the game ready. Now, we needed to promote it. We posted trailers about the map on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, which generated some interest. However, the map truly skyrocketed when a NickEh30 (Fortnite youtuber/streamer) posted a TikTok playing the map, getting over 3 million views in 24 hours (he wasn’t contacted/paid by us, probably someone sent him the code and he liked the map)
   

As for the next steps, we’re evaluating how the game will perform. How long can it maintain 1,000+ concurrent users (CCU)? Should we focus on improving the game further, intensify our marketing efforts, or shift our attention to other projects? The challenge with mini-game maps is maintaining playtime above 40 minutes, considering the abundance of tycoon games in the Discover section. Is it more beneficial to create a game with excellent replayability but shorter playtime, or a game with extended playtime that players will enter only once? Time will tell

[meowmix_tv]

just wanted to say this is my favorite uefn gamemode by a huge margin. very well done! 300 wins and i don’t plan on stopping. now that christmas is over, are you thinking of adding any new content to the map? some new trails or KO effects to work toward would be sweet!

[Clebito]

It’s been exactly 8 months since the I posted this, so here’s an update on how things are going!

Blade Ball Fortnite has become our most successfull game with 20M plays over the last months and we learned a lot from it. So I wanted to break down a few topics that might be interesting for other creators:

1. Discovery
2. No-combat maps
3. Community

1/ Blade Ball has always struggled with the discover algorithm because of it’s retention. The medium playtime is ~25minutes and from our experience, that is definitively not enough to place you in any discover row.

Our main issue is that the game is too challenging for beginners. A new player joins the game, doesn’t understand how it works and leave after being eliminated a few times. With that in mind, we started doing some quality of life updates to help the new players. We created a custom tracker, a UI to help them learn the controls.

After that, we focused on how to reward the player that kept playing. We explained it a little bit more on this tweet, but we spent 2-3 months creating one of the most complex inventory system, all based on Verse UI: x.com

All these updates helped, but the only row that the map enters consistenly is the Community Momentum, which looks for games that are driving new and returning users into Fortnite. (and is not related to playtime/retention or any other metrics)

No real conclusion on that topic, we’ll just keep trying to improve the game to see if it eventually starts appearing in some rows so new players can get to know the game. We’ve tried Epic Picks, but no luck: we filled the form in September 2023 and received a rejection email with “Other” as a response six months later (march 2024). We applied again and this time received a green email in May saying the map has passed the initial review process, but no one contacted us so far.

2/ Blade Ball is a variety game and we have already done a few of those (Bombernite, Bomb Wars) and we’re learning that is really hard to compete with combat games. That’s because combat games rarely breaks after an update, since they only rely on Battle Royale mechanics and those have Epics QA on their side. So creating a good variety game is challenging because every month there’s a new bug to fix.

Example 1: We had to disable EMOTES in our map because it was causing a Verse unrecoverable error. It’s been one month (Verse Runtime Crash Using .Damage on Players using Synced Emotes) and no fix yet.
Example 2: They changed sliding mechanics and it broke some competitiveness of our game. (Sliding Mechanics not working as intended) Now we have to explain everyone that it was not our fault and we’ll try to fix it.

Example 3: Input Triggers are not working correctly (MAJOR - Input trigger devices not working properly since last update - #12 by chrisp_games)
Example 4: Movement Modulator breaking the whole game if used in player that is not active (Movement Modulator breaks the whole game when activating for inactive fort_character). Started after an update and it was a pain to figure this one out.

Well, the list goes on, but the point is that it’s been really hard to create any kind of complex game that is not combat-focused because every other update there’s a new game breaking bug.

3/ What made the game standout from any other game that we made so far was its community. Blade Ball Fortnite is a highly competitive game and it reflected in a passionate community that plays the game regurlarly. There are players with over 20.000 wins and almost 80.000 eliminations

We took advantage of that by creating a discord server to receive feedback/bug reports and the game is always at 300+ ccu players because of the active playerbase. Initial shoutouts from big youtubers like NickEh30 and Lazarbeam were incredible helpful to make the game pop off, but at the end of the day, what will keep players engaged months after the release of an map is a fun gameplay.

We’re focusing on creating new arenas and cosmetics for the game while we work on other projects, but we’re hoping to see some improvements in the Discover system with more rows based on reccomendation. Hopefully I’ll be back in a few months to update again how to the map is going.