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FORTNITE · PROJECT BLACKJACK
When FORTNITE first came out, I noticed that when the game boots up, there’s no studio branding. Usually most games show their publisher’s logo as well as their own. I used to love how studios such as Lucasarts, EA, and WarnerBros. would customize their logo to fit the theme of whatever movie or game they were presenting. I had this idea to do something with building to present the EPIC Games logo when you start FORTNITE. I thought it might be good practice as well. The idea was to combine several of the game modes to be represented in one character centric logo animation. There was the classic builder class, the actual building, a monster from Save the World, and then the glider and character from Battle Royale.

At first this was just going to be a video with Kyle(classic builder), a cool glider, and an iconic character from Battle Royale such as Cuddle Team Leader(pink bear). However, as I mulled over the idea before starting, I thought it would be great if the characters could randomly change both gender and style each time the animation played. This led to having the glider match the skin style as well as the pickaxe and back bling. The idea was simple enough, but getting it to work was quite an undertaking. Just doing the animation alone is enough of a burden, so it took me a while to build up the inspiration to finally start. Plus, I was working on all this in my spare time, so it took a few months to get everything I needed together and find the time and energy to do the actual work.

Once I got a base animation working, I spent quite a bit of time making a level blueprint that would randomly pick which characters to use based on a structure I defined and swap them out before the animation starts. This also allowed for it to dynamically pick the gender as always the opposite for the builder vs the glider pilot. As it got more sophisticated, I added slots for custom animations to play on the glider if necessary, as well as have a custom sound. However, the idea was that the glider would take advantage of the work already done and just go into its glide state. This state is usually not just an animation playing, but several things happening on top via additive animations and behaviors. I had to get Aaron Cox, one of our animation programmers to add a variable that I could access to force gliders open and into this state. That required updating every unique glider animation blueprint, but it was worth it.

It took quite a bit of time to get my “level” fully functional, but once I had it done, all the lists built and working, I was quite pleased with myself. Playing it over and over and seeing it pick different characters and gliders sounds really simple, but with the volume in the game now, it’s quite cool to see in action. If my idea was implemented, every time the game started, the Epic branding would be completely unique. I even set it up with over-rides so that it could be customized for a certain event, character type, holiday theme, or specific store items.

When I presented this to a small group of various people, there were a lot of concerns with length and loading assets just for a logo animation. I ended up making a few versions which could also play randomly to reduce the length. There was the super short house and just the logo version, the builder, house and glider version, the house and monster version, and of course, a trimmed down version of everything all together. It makes me a bit sad that it didn’t gain much steam or interest, but I had a lot of fun making it and getting it to work.

<SplashLogo Samples