Friction goes against motivation, and if a creator is motivated rather than economically incentivized, having an editor where the simplest actions involve a 2-second process, bugs introduced bi-weekly, and now heavy restrictions that funnel the process through the eyes of game dev makes it so that you don’t want to build.
In Creative, even if bugs happened, I was always motivated, because even if some things were weird (like not having undo), there was a level of immersion and intuition made into the tools + the artstyle always kept me inspired, I love the art of Fortnite.
But now I am behind an interface instead, no character unless I wait 5 mins on every edit (I do landscape work too), and even though I have more power which I enjoy a lot, the feeling of immersion is not there unless I am building in live edit.
And every update is moving towards gamedev rather than UGC, so I feel left out more and more with added friction that could be handled in a different way or instead allow more flexibility.
Epic needs to understand that UEFN is a UGC hybrid not a gamedev engine. UGC is meant to be dumbed down and have no friction in development, that’s the main difference from Gamedev engines (and that is hosted within a game or has free use of its content, ALL of its content mind you). Any problem that does not relate specifically to gamedev should not be the user’s. The reason UEFN is a diamond in the rough is because it can bridge the gap between gamedev and UGC, specifically have the power of gamedev with the agility and ease of UGC.
Now if initiatives like the padding ^ 2 get constantly introduced (or when you disable Paper2D workflow, lock all your assets behind a validation system which can be used to create great content, disable most features of the parent engine to develop, have a moderation process that is made up and doesn’t follow industry guidelines or age ratings, then have a discovery system that is simply a popularity contest and allows only content creators to thrive), UEFN is becoming just a restrictive game dev engine with a very narrow focus on player demographics, which at this point from a developer perspective is not appealing anymore, I can use Unity which is much faster and intuitive to do things (I don’t care about engine performance, I am not making realistic games).
UGC is what keeps this engine alive, so start looking at making it easier to do things, instead of adding more friction every update. And don’t listen to the 3 game dev studios because they are a minority, listen to the Creative community which is feeling more and more abandoned everyday you add changes that are not pre-educated and are not easy to do in the first place (and generally add more clicks).
The point of UEFN should be “I have this cool idea, how fast can I make it before I forget it” rather “Let’s make the most optimized and convention-abiding game”, the latter should be the engine’s responsibility, not passed to the user unless its a choice. But its not a choice anymore:
-You can’t use engine content
-You can’t use fortnite content for building custom content
-You can’t use the Fortnite Engine content assets past the blueprints
-You can’t make a 2D game unless hacks
-You can’t alter gameplay past the 3rd person unless hacky
-You can’t have textures that are not padded to the power of 2, but at the same time you can use lumen and nanite which are light years ahead in tech.
-You can’t instantly test your game or code
-You can’t make a game that will be stable
-You can’t have a game that survives more than 2 weeks in Discovery (unless there is an exception)
-You can’t have a space character or start a filename with a number, but you can do that in the outliner cause reasons
-There are no optimization tools to tell you if you are doing things wrong, Creative and UEFN alike
-Most content you import will not work unless you know at least 3 tricks that are not shown anywhere
-Warning messages will usually pop up about things you don’t care about and clutter your screen
-Engine is a highly complicated hybrid which means that bugs can get introduced which are really hard to find, repro and report and only show when projects start scaling
-Many actions require knowledge of gamedev “because that’s how it was made back then” (like making a particle, or setting up a spinning wheel with a sequencer, or simply adding a skybox)
Now, I am not trashing on the engine just so I can vent, this is feedback that is a wake up call to all departments when they introduce more restrictions and processes to the engine.
I don’t see anyone introducing a hotkey to modeling mode tools or “Paste here” to make our lives easier, or heck, even ask us “are you having fun with UEFN? What are your blockers” and actually have someone work on these issues (documenting them is not enough, action is the only thing that matters). The hotkeys that were exposed recently most of them don’t even work.
And it seems to me that the original vision of UEFN which was “we will not restrict you for XYZ, you are what controls this now” is slowly and weirdly going away with updates, instead of actually getting more power to develop games:
-You cant have a gun firing in the thumbnail anymore
-You cant have carbonated drinks and show that they do good for the player and get featured
-You cant have numbers or an alphabet in your map, and the player can throw something to them
-You cant have mentions to any discord or twitter CTA, even if it for obtaining user feedback and bugs.
-You can’t compress audio files anymore, a specific way is forced upon you
-You can’t have custom resolutions on textures now too.
Like where does this stop? Do we need to be updating our previous games constantly now and make that a full time job so that we can get our 20 CCU? Any form of complexity and going away from BR mechanics is not rewarded and we all have to just use the default devices and do the same things BR does to leech off their playerbase, whilst telling any other player base that we don’t care about them. Because the moment we don’t make simple combat games, we have to deal with all the friction again, and the constant changes, and the bugs and the game dev funneling.
I am demotivated to build atm, because it feels like the original vision of UEFN has been lost. You turned this wonderful editor that had potential to be an industry leader into a demotivating series of checklists with no soul.
Please, please consult creators on how to revert friction and add shortcuts to bring back the ease and immersion of Creative.
P.S. To the argument “If you love Creative so much, why don’t you build in it then?”, have you seen how buggy Creative has gotten with the lack of a development team manpower to support it? For 5 months, you couldn’t even open the mode by clicking on it and it was fixed when a season changed the interface.