I come from a background of casual game development on Roblox and asset creation in Blender but nothing serious and so admittedly I am not familiar with UEFN but it seems less like the ‘infinite possibility’ version of creative than it first seemed to be.
Not only me, but others I saw (YouTube etc) thought we’d have regular Fortnite content available to use and modify to create new experiences without having to essentially develop a game and all it’s tools/features completely from the ground up. However, all Fortnite content is read only meaning you cannot edit them in any way, so that kills the idea of reskinning, custom model upgrades, property/functionality settings etc.
Not only that, but the options available to ‘customise’ content, if it even qualifies as customisation, are dire and extremely basic. I thought something simple such as using the Fortnite creatures and just changing a scaling setting to make them huge would be easy, but unless I just haven’t found how to do it yet, it appears to be impossible.
Perhaps I am not the target audience and you have to be an industry expert to develop anything new in UEFN, but I got the impression they were going for a user-friendly approach to help their large, young audience create in UEFN too. If so, they aren’t making it easy when all of the core content is read-only locked and completely off limits for customising.
Some examples of basic improvements would be:
- Allow people to change the size of creatures/players/wildlife
- Allow people to change the colour schemes/materials/textures of items/creatures etc
- Allow people to import custom assets such as weapons and devices and use existing weapon/tool functionality (reskin assets with custom mesh)
- Also as a side note, the object transformation/scaling/rotating tools in UE5 seem far less intuitive as they do in Blender or even Roblox.
I’m sure the list could go on, but to summarise, I believe UEFN is lacking the freedom creators need to allow them to really let their creativity loose.