A few weeks ago, I had an idea for a game that I could make using Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN). It's not something I've ever done before, but it sounded like a fun project so I did it.

The idea was to take the "The Shark" POI, which you Fortnite players may remember from Chapter 2 Season 2, and make a game where the goal is to get from a platform at one end of the shark-shaped rock formation to a platform at the other end without touching the ground, water, or any prebuilt structures.

Jump the Shark

The entire The Shark island is available as a starter map for making your own games, so getting started building the map was super easy. I just had to learn how to modify terrain to make two little islands for the launch and target platforms (which was also super easy.)

That's where the easy stuff ended. There was definitely a learning curve when it came to figuring out what types of objects to use to do what, setting all the properties for objects in the game, and writing the Verse code that was necessary to make my game work the way I wanted it to. (If Verse code hadn't been needed, I believe I could have built the game in Fortnite Creative Mode...but I wanted some unique game mechanics that can't be created that way.)

Several times during the process, I ran into brick walls where something that I assumed would be possible turned out to not be (like easily detecting when a player landed on the ground, modifying the strength of a shockwave grenade, or detecting when a shockwave grenade was thrown at a particular target.) So I had to either drop a few ideas I'd planned to implement or come up with different ways to achieve the same effect.

I put a few things in the game just for fun. I'll let other people find and reveal some of them. On of the more obvious is a little island waaaaay out on the other end of the map. Here's what you'll find there:

In the end, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Now I just need to get enough people playing at once to have a good test of whether some of the easy methods of winning are hard enough when there are other people trying to stop you! The game is called "Jump the Shark" (click to play island code 1264-2174-2747).