Creating Tycoon Maps in Fortnite as Fast as a Fortnite Tycoon

Hi! I am Valerie, a Full-Stack Developer here at Mighty Bear Games. Besides working on our current hit, Mighty Action Heroes, I am also exploring possibilities with Unreal Editor For Fortnite (UEFN) for our new project, under the entity The Legit Games Company.

If you have not heard of UEFN, it is an extension of Unreal Engine that is designed specifically for creating user-generated content (UGC) within Fortnite. If you have explored Fortnite and its UGC over the past few months, you might have noticed the sheer variety of game modes available, one of the most popular being tycoon maps.

So what are tycoon maps in Fortnite?

Waifu Tycoon 2 — Island Code 8331–6898–8083

The main objective: become a tycoon! In a typical tycoon game, there are a few main mechanics for players to “get rich” in-game. The typical cycle goes like this:

1. You gain a little of the primary currency (either through some active action or they get provided at the start of the game to get you playing)
2. You choose how you want to use those currencies — mostly to purchase your first generator
3. The generator then constantly generates more currency for you
4. Rinse and repeat until you’re rich.

In the world of Fortnite, there are various mechanics to go about doing this:

1. Active action to gain primary currency — Fighting creatures, wildlife, guards, or other players
2. Wait for generators to generate enough currency for you
3. Do some other activities to speed up the currency generation, such as interacting with non-playable characters (NPCs), etc.
4. If there are other secondary currencies, you can probably exchange them for the primary currency

With experience points (XP) calibration, spending time in Fortnite Tycoon maps can be a very rewarding and casual game mode since it also progresses your battle pass.

With all the activities and mechanics that you can potentially create for different gameplay experiences, and the intention to create a mode that players can stay in for long periods, there are some pain points that we have faced.

Custom Assets

To make our maps stand out from others and give them a unique touch, simply using the Fortnite models just does not do it. We spend time creating custom 3D models and 2D textures and incorporating them into our tycoon maps. Waifu Tycoon 2, which combines almost all the custom assets we have done, features these custom assets.

P.S. It is a waifu war among Waifus from Waifu Tycoon, Kpop Tycoon, and CEO Tycoon!

Our custom models used in Waifu Tycoon 2

Game Progression

In many tycoon maps, after achieving some level of “wealth”, or after unlocking certain features and elements of the game, more features and elements get unlocked. In Kpop Tycoon, the building gets upgraded, and the idol herself also transforms throughout the game. Planning and designing how progression should be can be time-consuming and tedious.

Flowchart of progression in Waifu Tycoon.

Persistence

The introduction of Custom Persistable Data in Verse in Fortnite’s V29.00 Ecosystem Update makes Tycoon Games much more replayable. Players’ progression in the map can now be persisted — their inventory can be saved, their “wealth” can be saved, custom points and scores for different purposes can be saved, etc., and players can continue from where they left off even after leaving the island. In addition, there can now be leaderboards in-game!

For example, with Waifu Tycoon 2 Version 4, we’ve introduced the concept of “Affection Points”, where players can build their relationship with the different Waifus in the game. Before V29.00, we would only persist a global score, but now, we can save players’ progression with the different Waifus. We can only keep track (to a certain extent) the number of days players visit our island, which, was not as clean if we were to do it before V29.00.

Sheer Quantity

The amount of things that require setup is insane, with a lot of copy-pasting that can be manual and tedious. In Waifu Tycoon, our first tycoon map, we even set up a conditional button for every unlockable element in the map. This means if we have 100 elements to unlock, we have to set up the costing 100 times. And with 1,000 elements to unlock, we would have to set up the costing 1,000 times. That’s insane!

What if we have to duplicate it for multiplayer mode? That is two or more times the work!

To streamline this, we made the calculations of the cost and resource generation dynamic and created Verse devices to handle the calculations, so all we had to set up was the base and its related multipliers. This allowed us to set up a huge number of possible upgrades easily. We also made use of Verse Tags to indicate which Tycoon area (i.e. which player) the upgrades belong to.

A snippet of one upgradeable / unlockable element

Various verse tags used by upgrades to indicate which player they should belong to

A manager class to handle all upgrades (maintains the list of unlockable_configs with the right verse tags)

Supporting Multiplayer

To make a tycoon map with more replayability, the fastest element to add to the gameplay would be some sort of player-versus-player (PVP). We have learned from our previous maps that single-player maps simply do not perform as well due to low replayability and dryness of content.

To support PVP and multiplayer modes, it would mean each player has their own

1. Tycoon area
2. Set of weapons and armory

To set up multiple tycoon areas with the same progression track, it would require detailed planning:

1. What is the upgrade path?
2. When should weapons be available so players can defend themselves from others?
3. What weapons should be included? — e.g. After adding Season 2 Chapter 5 weapons in Waifu Tycoon 2, the map’s popularity shot up.
4. How do you position your assets such that duplication, moving, and rotating assets is as seamless as possible?
5. How should you name your assets and devices so that after duplication, the names of the assets make sense? — e.g. everything for Player 1 should be appended with “_P1” so duplicating them becomes “_P2” for player 2 etc.
6. What are some of the devices and assets that do not require duplication? — e.g. Accolades, Analytics, Item Granters might not require duplication and can be shared across players

These questions have to be addressed to make the development of a multiplayer tycoon map as seamless as possible.

Our 4 Waifus

With this much to do, how did we ship Waifu Tycoon 2 in a week?

1. Decide on the map’s theme — this dictates what assets we need, and how that environment should be built.
2. Decide on core mechanics: Do players interact with a button to unlock elements? Do players walk over a trigger to unlock elements? Do elements unlock automatically as your wealth increases? These considerations and designs needed to be ironed out so that we know what implementations require Verse.
3. A couple of Artists on the team are dedicated to generating custom assets using artificial intelligence (AI). We have been leveraging AI for our processes for a while, and it has proven useful and efficient time and time again. (Check out how we have incorporated AI in our Art Production process in this article by our Art Production Lead, Mario!)
4. We have another Artist dedicated to building the full environment of the island. In this process, unlockable elements in the game must be properly organized so it’s easy to incorporate them into the gameplay.
5. We have a Designer to iron out the numbers and plan the gameplay flow.
6. The Engineers would then focus on the Verse implementation and crafting the base setup to ease duplication later.

Example of what an upgrade for the first player looks like

With all the essential building blocks ready, we then incorporate and join everything together, and the result looks something like this (on the UEFN outliner):

I hope this has helped you to break down your tycoon game ideas and give you a clearer picture of how to start creating your own! Also, if you want to know more about creating games within Fortnite, check out our Lead Client Developer, Khalid’s article here!