What happens when game developers make the Walking Dead game in Fortnite? New Ways to Game Studios

It can be said that the timing of the gaming industry has been tough between layoffs, studio closures and funding exhaustion. Enrique Fuentes, CEO and co-founder of Teravision Games, experienced this upheaval when he and his team released Klowns, the killer of Euthace Space, an asymmetric horror game based on the same name. The game received good reviews (IGN gave 7, calling it “as stupid and fun as producing it.” But the team found itself in a difficult position after launching, which is the same difficult position for many in the gaming industry.

“As you know, 2024 has been a very tough year for the industry as a whole. So it's a bit slow for us to close the next project,” Fuentes said. Despite working with companies like Disney, Nickelodeon and Xbox, Travis has had a hard time finding follow-up projects for Klowns. Over time, the studio and its experience in the industry experience will go toward some novels: Making games in Fortnite. In less than a year, Teravision released three Unreal Engines for Fortnite (UEFN) games. Its fourth game launches today, and it utilizes the Walking Dead content package released on UEFN.

Teravision co-founded with The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman in partnership with Skybound, Teravision's latest UEFN game is the King of Hill Style Multiperailer PVPVE Project, called Courtyard King, where players fight each other as well as NPC zombies to control the death of death of death of death of the infamous and infamous and infamous and infamous and infamous and infamous prison.

All that is related to the Walking Dead of the Garden King is made using official assets released for UEFN, including character models based on Rick Grimes, Negan and Daryl Dixon. But the project is more than just an asset. Teravision worked with Skybound writers to create stories and dialogues for the game.

“We've worked with big brands in the past… Uefn is something we're trying… but we never imagined that it would be the root of what we're going to be interacting with a company like Skybound,” Fuentes said. “But I mean, UGC, that's one of the biggest things in the game right now.”

UGC or user-generated content is driving one of the biggest trends in the game thanks to platforms like Fortnite. This playground-style game production has found a large number of viewers in services such as Roblox, but the “U” in UGC usually refers to the end user, that is, the players at home. UGC developed by Professional Studios is a newer concept, and Fortnite’s Unreal Engine 5 tool is perfect for experienced developers like Teravision.

“It makes sense because we come from an engineering background, which is a platform that can be experimented and taken some risks,” Fuentes explained. “Because these projects are not killer clowns in outer space, but projects that we can organize in weeks or months.”

Teravision's experiment led to the launch of Havoc Hotel, a Roguelike shooting game where you fight at the hotel level and every cleared floor earns you buy more powerful weapons. The first hotel was very popular with the first to destroy the hotel, enough to continue working on the series. Eventually we arrived at Hotel 3, which has been one of Fortnite's most popular games now.

Martin Rodriguez, game designer at Teravision, said that given that the studio had previously made killer Klown in Unreal Engine, jumping to UEFN's uefn (a modified version of Unreal Engine 5) is not only convenient, but also keeping experienced Devs out of their heels when creating UEFN games. As Rodriguez said, these systems are simplified and the process is more “drag and drop”. “For us, it just took away some of the work we could have done and allowed us to focus on making better games and exploring different new ideas.”

Although engineering effortlessly adapted to UEFN based on unrealistic tools, the game design team faced unique challenges. Games like Havoc Hotel started as an experiment rather than a comprehensive game, but quickly evolved into something of its own. Teravision’s creative director LD Zambrano quickly learned that UEFN games are different from traditional games in many ways.

“We have experienced the traditional experience of designing other (non-EUFN) games, and it’s the players that connect through the goals of attracting collaboration and competition, right?” Zambrano said. “In the case of (UEFN), we found that even if these goals are still relevant, we can still use the sensitivity of the game design and bring it there, but I found that there are a lot of experiences that are very popular in Fortnite’s ecosystem, and these experiences are just context. They are weird situations and interactions that don’t necessarily translate into very clear competition, but they can still be used.”

Zambrano compared UEFN games with school yards. “I found that there was this approach to each other to get me back to rest, and it was you meet someone and make up some kind of game that might not make sense, but you're still engaging and building friendships. That's what I mean, some of these games became “background.”

In this way, one thing I learned about the Garden King from Teravision is that it is an unlimited game, which means there is no final champion at the end of the round. Instead, the game will continue forever, with the players jumping out of the field and switching teams. While there will always be a winning team, there will never be a final round that a real winner will get.

“Players can fall and exit anytime, anywhere. They can even change the team at any time, which creates betrayal. Maybe you went to the party with your friend, but in the middle of the game, you don't tell him and switch teams. This is very similar to the dead person who died.”

Is this the future of game developers? On the one hand, it puts them in the sandbox of other big players, such as Epic Games or Roblox. But there are many benefits for studios that want to experiment without burning the entire fund, with access to large player bases and large IP assets, such as The Walking Dead, Enrique Fuentes says.

“In fact, we can take the risk of independent developers (UEFN). Because last year, we couldn't even consider starting a three-year project. We could do something with smaller teams in a few weeks, which completely changed the paradigm of new developers. Now, it's a viable model where you can have 80-person studios like us, we can assume risk, we can assume risk,” Fuentes said. “It's, if you have the right idea, the right creativity around it, if you know the market enough and have the right idea, then execution can become possible and it doesn't take years, and it actually takes weeks or even months. I think it's an independent developer's dream. ”

Matt Kim is an advanced feature editor for IGN.