The StaffsVerse

Gameplay GIFs

Overview

I joined the team as a technical designer and the project had already existed for well over a year. The Stoke campus was already complete, leaving us with the London campus to create. Within the team of 6, I acted as a technical designer where my responsibilities included: adding mini-games, aiding the player's exploration, and working with artists for general level meshing. Essentially making the StaffsVerse fun and enjoyable for prospective students to explore!

This was professional work; we used Trello for productivity, alongside Microsoft Teams for communication. I gained useful experience in adapting to new engines and coding languages, while also collaborating with other designers, programmers, and artists. UEFN uses Verse which is their own custom scripting language that I had to learn. Moreover, I learned how different developing a multiplayer game is compared to a single player game.

Role: Technical Designer

Genre: Virtual Tour, Exploration

Engine: Unreal Engine Fortnite

Team Size: 6

Duration: 6 Weeks

Platform: Fortnite

Year: 2024

Over my 6-week Internship, here are my key contributions:

Traversal Options - Added rail grinding, vehicles, and more!
Bike Race Mini-Game - Implemented a bike racing mini-game, solo, or multiplayer.
Location Interactions - Added specific interactions around the map that have events related to the location.

Traversal Options

This was my first point of action because on day 1 I picked up the project and play tested it for around half an hour, and the main point that stood out to me was that the map felt massive! There was no way to quickly traverse the map and explore the campus, this was leading to boredom due to the tedious walking and sprinting around. To solve this I added rail grinding, vehicles, and vending machines....

Rail Grinding:

This was easy to add thanks to UEFN already having a built-in rail grinding spline that you can add on top of anything. So straight away, I added rail grinding all over the map so that players can be suprised when they suddenly start zooming along a long rail that once would've been boring but is now awesome!

Fig. 1, shows how the player can zoom along any long rail sections all around the campus.

You can also see that I have added coins as an affordance for the player to engage with this mechanic. There was nothing telling them that rail grinding exists, and so putting these coins along the rail was the method I used to entice the player to come and jump onto the rails.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Vehicles:

Vehicles are another way that a player can navigate a map much quicker, and so I decided to add a load of motorbikes on a rack so the players can not only compete in the bike race mini game, but also just drive around and enjoy the campus.

Fig. 2

Vending Machines:

Following on from that, I realised that we didn't want the player to get lost and not look at all of the main buildings. To counter this issue, I added vending machines at all of the main buildings on the campuses. These vending machines are eye-catching and I have again used coins to breadcrumb the player to these locations too.

Fig. 3

As seen in Fig. 3, these vending machines can contain various traversal items such as the jetpack. This makes exploring the campus feel much more fun and enjoyable, while also giving us the ability to add achievements to things that weren't possible before. For example, one of the other designers was doing an achievements system, so now with these items, players can reach the top of the highest building and gain the achievement "King of the Campus!"

Bike Race Mini-Game

Something that the lead, and project director kept mentioning was to have a bike race track around the campuses. I noticed this and took it upon my self to prototype and implement this idea. Initially, I developed it in a separate project, and then ported it over into the main StaffsVerse project. I made two races for the Stoke campus, and one for the London campus.

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

From both Fig. 4, and Fig. 5, you can see the multiplayer aspect of the bike-race. The only issue is that you must coordinate it in your own voice or text chat rather than there being a race where everyone can suddenly all move at the same time.

UEFN offers an island type for "Rocket Racing" which includes all of this traditional multiplayer racing game functionality, however the project was not made on this type, and furthermore it would restrict the content we can use too much. This was really unfortunate as Epic also do not allow you to migrate the race manager content from there into a normal island type either, this meant that we would need to develop our own custom system for this.

Considering the strict time constraints of the project, and my little experience with the Verse coding language, and multiplayer development we decided this would not be an option for us. So instead, it works as a solo race, but you can coordinate the races with your friends, or fellow prospective students.

If I had time to expand this system, I would've loved to add a time-trial leader board that shows the fastest bike racing time. This would encourage people to engage with this mechanic a lot more, and would appeal to the more competitive player types too.

Location Interactions

For a bit of extra flair in the short time we had remaining, we all thought it was a great idea to add some small but cool interactions at some iconic locations across the campus. The best example I can give is having a drink at "The Four Quarters" pub on the London campus.

Fig. 6, shows the cool little drunk effect you can get from this interaction. If we had more time we would have added many more of these to give the project the 'charm' factor.

But overall, I think we did a great job considering the small amount of time that we were given.

Fig. 6