Drive Bikini Bottom (island code: 5218-8692-0070) is a mobile-first driving game built by developer Pure Moxi Games.
Key Learnings
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Think Mobile-First from the start to create an experience that feels native to the platform.
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Leverage Mobile Preview to test early and often.
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Use Custom Input & Touch controls to remove unnecessary buttons
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Leverage Vehicle health on the Verse API to create better UI for driving experiences
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Design for readability first, spectacle second.
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Short sessions improve both performance and fun for both mobile and desktop players.
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Limit complexity, not depth.
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Build chaos with clear priorities.
Introduction
Hello! I’m Gabriel Pelussi from Pure Moxi Games, developers of the brand new SpongeBob game Drive Bikini Bottom. It’s a fast-paced, multiplayer driving experience built in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), designed around short-session chaos, physics-based mayhem, and the unmistakable humor of SpongeBob SquarePants. The project explores how far vehicle-based gameplay, systemic comedy, and free-for-all competition can be pushed within UEFN while remaining accessible, performant, and mobile-first.
The game places players inside Bikini Bottom, where everyone competes simultaneously to complete absurd missions, sabotage each other’s progress, and trigger over-the-top environmental gags. Inspired by arcade driving classics like Crazy Taxi, modern mobile racers like Asphalt 9, and party-style chaos games such as Bumper Cars CHAOS, Drive Bikini Bottom reframes racing not as a linear contest, but as a comedic sandbox where failure is part of the fun.
Rather than focusing on clean laps or perfect driving, this game rewards momentum, improvisation, and chaos. Players are encouraged to crash, bounce, interrupt each other, and embrace the unpredictability of multiplayer physics.
Island Concept Summary
Top-down view of our map
At its core, Drive Bikini Bottom is built around three guiding pillars:
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High-Velocity, Low-Friction Fun (Pick-Up-and-Play Driving)
Driving is snappy, readable, and instantly enjoyable on mobile. Collisions are exaggerated, vehicles bounce and spin, and the environment reacts with visual and audio gags. Chaos is not a side-effect; it is the main mechanic. -
Short, Mobile-First Sessions
Missions are designed to last between 30 and 90 seconds, making the game ideal for mobile players and casual drop-in play. The map is divided into compact, high-readability zones that ensure objectives are always close, visible, and achievable even during heavy chaos. -
Rewarding Progression & Customization
Players earn rewards for completing missions, exploring the world and mastering challenges, unlocking new vehicles along the way.
Goals
Clear signposting for missions
With Drive Bikini Bottom, our team set out to answer a few core design questions:
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How can mobile-first constraints improve clarity, pacing, and humor rather than limit them?
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How can a licensed world like SpongeBob be translated into systemic gameplay, not just visuals?
The result is an island that prioritizes readability, performance, and comedy while embracing the unpredictability that makes multiplayer Fortnite experiences memorable.
Challenges
Building *Drive Bikini Bottom *required balancing exaggerated chaos with tight technical constraints. While the game embraces unpredictability and comedy, every system needed to remain readable, performant, and friendly to mobile players. The following challenges shaped much of the island’s design and technical direction.
Designing Vehicles for Chaotic Multiplayer
Vehicle gameplay is the foundation of this game, but designing boats that felt fun, chaotic, and controllable, especially in a free-for-all multiplayer environment, posed an immediate challenge.
Early prototypes leaned too far in either direction. Vehicles that felt realistic quickly became frustrating when multiple players collided at once. Conversely, overly loose handling made it difficult for players to intentionally complete missions or navigate the map. The team needed a balance where loss of control was funny, not punishing.
To solve this, vehicle physics were tuned to prioritize:
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Fast acceleration and forgiving steering
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Exaggerated collision reactions (spin-outs, bounces)
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Quick recovery after crashes
This ensured that crashes felt dramatic without stopping momentum for long. The handling model encouraged players to stay aggressive and active rather than cautious.
Building for Mobile-First
In-game picture of the Goo Lagoon
From day one, Drive Bikini Bottom was designed for mobile first, not adapted for mobile later. That decision shaped nearly every system, control, and iteration loop throughout development.
Firstly, we made sure that we had the right inputs turned on by using the Custom Input and Touch Control and turning on the “Pacifist Icons for Touch” in the IslandSettings, so we would make sure that the player would interact with the game by driving and not having any other input that wouldn’t fit.
Then, for the design, we wanted to make sure to have a good overall experience for both the mobile and desktop players, so we came to a few decisions that would guide our development:
Mobile-First Design Decisions:
Short, High-Energy Sessions
We designed gameplay around 3-5 minute sessions, ideal for quick play on the go. Missions are intentionally bite-sized, with clear objectives and immediate feedback, allowing players to jump in, complete a task, and feel rewarded without long commitment.
Intentional Constraint
Rather than offering multiple gameplay verbs and complex interactions, we chose to focus the entire experience around a single, highly polished action: driving. By limiting the player’s actions to driving, we eliminate the need to context-switch between movement modes, interaction systems, or combat states. Players immediately understand what to do and can stay immersed without mental friction.
Visual Clarity Over Fidelity
Environments, vehicles, and VFX were built for readability on small screens. We favored bold silhouettes, exaggerated motion, and clear color contrast over fine detail. This ensured hazards, power-ups, and mission goals are instantly recognizable at a glance.
Fail-Forward Design
Crashes, mistakes, and missed objectives are framed as comedy moments rather than punishment. This keeps the experience fun and forgiving, which is especially important for mobile play where interruptions are common.
Rapid Iteration with Mobile Preview
Mobile Preview was a critical production tool throughout development and significantly reduced iteration time.
Instead of building, packaging, and deploying changes to physical devices, we were able to:
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Instantly test control tuning and UI scaling
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Validate readability and camera framing
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Iterate on mission pacing and difficulty
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Catch mobile-specific performance issues early
Widget creation with device safe zone and the selection of mobile devices
This dramatically shortened our feedback loop. Changes that previously might have taken hours or a full day to validate on hardware could now be tested in minutes. As a result, we shipped with more refined controls, clearer UI, and better-balanced gameplay than would have been possible otherwise.
One of the biggest challenges was ensuring players could quickly understand:
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Where to go
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What mission was active
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What other players were doing
This challenge became especially difficult in chaotic scenarios where multiple objectives, vehicles, and effects were visible at once. On smaller screens, excessive UI or visual noise quickly led to confusion.
Here is also where the Mobile Preview tool came into play, where we could emulate different device options from tablets, iOS and Android with different types of profiles, so we could make sure that each of the UI elements and the overall user experience was readable and functional, even on smaller screens and older devices. These were used not only on player buttons but on widgets and text as well.
At the end, the team addressed such complexities by:
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Limiting the number of simultaneous on-screen objectives
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Favoring large icons, bright silhouettes, and strong color contrast
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Designing routes that gently guide players without relying on complex minimaps
Mobile constraints helped reinforce better design discipline, resulting in a game that remained readable even at peak chaos.
Performance and Memory Constraints
In-game gif of a mission being completed in mobile preview
Physics-based multiplayer gameplay is inherently demanding, and performance quickly became one of the project’s defining challenges.
With multiple moving vehicles, collision events, mission logic, and gag triggers happening simultaneously, the team had to carefully manage memory and CPU usage especially to support mid-range mobile devices.
The team also heavily relied on the Mobile Preview tool when developing in such constraints, with its ease of use to emulate different mobile devices, we could then test and see if any of the new additions to the game would still run smoothly and deliver a great experience even in low-end devices, which ultimately led us to making decisions that would ensure that every player would have a fun and equally enjoyable experience.
Key decisions included:
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Keeping arenas compact to reduce draw distance
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Reusing modular props and materials across zones
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Reducing dynamic physics objects to only those that directly affected gameplay
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Using baked lighting wherever possible
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Limiting simultaneous visual effects during peak chaos moments
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Keeping the project size under 50%
Rather than reducing chaos, the team focused on prioritizing which chaos mattered most: player collisions and mission-critical actions while trimming effects that added little gameplay value.
Intro cinematic from the gameplay
Designing Missions That Survive Chaos
Mission design in Drive Bikini Bottom had to function in an environment where players actively interfere with each other. Traditional racing or delivery missions often break down when collisions and sabotage are constant.
The challenge was ensuring missions stayed:
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Simple to understand
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Quick to complete
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Fun even when failing
To address this challenge, missions were built with:
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Short objectives
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Generous completion windows
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Scoring that rewards both success and disruption
Failing a mission due to interference isn’t a dead end. Instead, it often triggers opportunities to pivot into a new objective immediately. This approach reframes failure as part of the fun loop rather than a setback.
Key Learnings
In-game picture of the player’s lobby and the car selection
Think Mobile-First from the start
Designing Drive Bikini Bottom as a mobile-first experience shaped nearly every creative and technical decision. By treating mobile not as a limitation but as a design anchor, our team uncovered several best practices that helped improve clarity, performance, and player engagement across all platforms.
Leverage Mobile Preview to test early and consistently develop with mobile in mind
The Mobile Preview tool made possible that we could test and iterate constantly during the development phase by checking on the UI and UX aspects of the mobile devices and also by checking the performance of lower end devices, making tasks that could take hours or days to be done quickly and with minimal context change.
Utilize Input & Touch controls to achieve a streamlined experience
With the Custom Input & Touch Controls tool we could make the experience smooth by changing the player inputs to better fit a driving game without shooting and other aggressive actions, using the pacifist input configuration made it easy to start testing and iterating right away
Implement Custom Vehicle health on the Verse API to create better UI
By using the new Vehicle Health options in the Verse API from 39.10 we could create a better custom SpongeBob-themed vehicle UI, making it clear which health and durability the player needed to be aware of while playing the game.
Design for Readability First, Spectacle Second
On mobile screens, clarity is more valuable than detail. Early builds demonstrated that high visual density quickly became overwhelming during chaotic moments, especially when multiple players and objectives were active.
The most successful iterations favored:
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Large, readable silhouettes over fine detail
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Strong color contrast to separate gameplay elements
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Clear visual hierarchy between environment, players, and objectives
Prioritizing readability reduced player confusion and made chaos easier to follow, even when several collisions occurred simultaneously.
Best Practice:
If an element doesn’t communicate gameplay at a glance from a small screen, simplify it.
Short Sessions Improve Both Performance and Fun
Mobile play naturally favors shorter sessions. Embracing this constraint helped shape a tighter core loop that benefited all platforms.
By designing missions to last 3–5 minutes, the team:
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Reduced gameplay complexity
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Minimized player downtime after failures
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Encouraged experimentation and risk-taking
Fast restarts and quick objective swaps kept the game feeling energetic instead of punishing, reinforcing replayability.
Best Practice:
Design for fast failure and fast recovery, especially in chaotic multiplayer games.
Limit Complexity, Not Depth
Although this game was built mobile-first, these constraints ultimately improved the game on all platforms.
Cleaner layouts, clearer objectives, optimized performance, and shorter sessions made the experience more accessible and engaging regardless of device.
Instead of stacking many small mechanics, Drive Bikini Bottom focuses on:
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A small set of clear mission types
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Strong player-to-player interaction
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Emergent chaos from simple rules
This approach created depth through interaction rather than through layered complexity.
Best Practice:
Depth emerges naturally when multiple players interact with simple, readable systems.
Build Chaos with Clear Priorities
Not all chaos is equally valuable. During development, the team identified which types of chaos mattered most:
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Player-to-player collisions
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Mission interference
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Readable, comedic feedback
Lower-impact chaos, such as unnecessary particle effects or decorative physics objects, was gradually reduced to protect performance.
Best Practice:
Choose the chaos that drives gameplay and comedy and cut the rest.
Final Takeaway
Mobile-first development wasn’t just a technical requirement for Drive Bikini Bottom - it became a creative lens that helped define the game’s identity. By embracing limitations early, the team created a focused, high-energy multiplayer experience where chaos, clarity, and comedy coexist.
These learnings can be applied to any UEFN project aiming to reach a wide audience, deliver strong performance, and create memorable moment-to-moment gameplay.
We’d love to hear your feedback! Use island code 5218-8692-0070 to play Drive Bikini Bottom and let us know how we did!