Persistent Nature Is at the Core of Fortnite

Fortnite is getting a lot of attention because it will offer gamers the first look at the new Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games and the developer believes that one of the most interesting aspects of the game will be the way it allows gamers to create persistent long-term game worlds.

Tanya Jessen, who is a game producer working on Fortnite, tells Rock, Paper, Shotgun that, “For Fortnite, that was a really great move, to be able to use the next version of Kismet. It’s called Blueprint.”

“For example, our skybox is built entirely in a Blueprint, and that’s the day-night cycle. All the programmers had to do was expose, you know, what time was it relevant to gameplay, and now the artists can go make all of these objects that are relevant to the time of day,” she explains.

She further offers some examples, saying, “So after a certain time, all the streetlights will turn on wherever you’re at. The clocks in the world tell the actual in-game time. Things like that, in the past, would have to be programmed by a coder. Now they’re all set up by our artists. Everything from how many different shaders in the colors of the sky that change depending on the night, that all now can be iterated and made awesome by the artists.”

Jessen also believes that the nature of the Unreal Engine 4 will allow a wide number of PC gamers to get and play Fortnite while also giving the Epic Games team a way of quickly updating the experience.

Fortnite has been officially announced as coming to the PC during 2013, but Epic Games has made it clear that it will probably also release the game on other platforms.

The fact that they have not been specified means that the company is probably referring to the upcoming next-generation releases from Sony and Microsoft.