I just made my first map public and listed. It’s called Fireball Arena. 4195-8467-3857
Trailer: https://youtu.be/YMdC_RN3hbM
Overview
Fireball Arena is Fortnite meeting soccer, lacrosse, hockey, and rugby, but of course with a Fortnite twist. Gameplay was inspired by a great mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 called Deathball.
Dev Notes
The game required a lot of devices and over 1,500 lines of code. There are a lot of neat things I had to do to make this all work. Some of those items include:
- Innovative use of the physics ball - There are lots of soccer type games that use the physics ball, but this is different. In Fireball Arena, players can pickup the ball, run with it, charge up a shot, and shoot the ball forward.
- Physics ball in Verse - If you’ve tried to work with the physics ball in Verse, you already know that there is no API for the physics ball, and there is no way in the physics ball device itself to pickup or throw a ball. But I found a way to access the physics ball in Verse code. That allowed me to write code to allow players to pick it up, steal it from other players, and shoot it forward with varying degrees of power. I had to dust of my high school trig textbook for that one.
- Shot Power - If you have the ball, you can press what is likely your Aim/Zoom button to charge your shot. Press down to charge, release to shoot. While charging a shot, the indicator bar fills up and changes color to get more firey as you charge your shot. This had to be done 100% in Verse. Using materials and the UI widget editor always resulted in the progress bar updating in chunks, rather than smoothly.
- Knock Back - Bring your pickaxe! When you pickaxe a player on the other team, they get knocked back. If that player has the ball that player will drop the ball where they are and get knocked back to give you space to pickup the ball.
- Instructions - Press and hold the Interact button and an instructions screen comes in from the left like an off canvas menu on a website. Release it and it goes away. Not exactly complex, but I thought it was a nice addition to make the game friendly for new players.
Dev Time - I started learning UEFN and Verse from nothing in late November 2024. I did tutorials, a class on Udemy, and watched a lot of youtube videos to learn what I need to. It’s been almost four months of nights and weekends to get this ready.
Location - The first arena we play in is a heavily modified version of Nitro Drome! It was a great POI and it had a lot of the components needed for this type of game. If the map gets enough traction to justify more time investment, I plan to add more arenas inspired by famous Fortnite POIs and rotate between them for each game.
What’s Next?
There were some cool innovations with the physics ball that definitely lend themselves to more game modes. And I absolutely have ideas there. The team is called Allstar Arena - and for now it is just me and some family testers. I am better with code and solving problems than design and marketing, so if anyone is interested in joining the team, I am open to talking about it.
