A lot has changed with Epic Games’ first free-to-play PC game, Fortnite, since it was first announced a few years ago. The game now runs on Unreal Engine 4 technology and the gameplay experience has evolved to bring invading monsters out with storms that sweep through the area during the day and at night.

Epic allowed select press members to play an early Alpha version of the four-player cooperative gameplay and get a taste of the five versus five competitive gameplay at its headquarters recently.

Fortnite lead designer Darren Sugg explains what’s new with the game and discusses the booming Triange game development area in this exclusive interview.

  • What’s the game development community like for you in the Triangle to Seattle and other places where you’ve worked and developed games?

Raleigh is just a smaller place, and because it’s smaller the community of developers is smaller. What is interesting about that is that you know a lot of people. You’ll bump into people at bars on the street.

I’ll go out and I’ll frequently see my coworkers at certain places or bump into QA guys from another studio that have worked here before. It’s a smaller community and that has its own charm.

Having worked in Boston and Seattle, there are just more people, so you don’t have that sort of feeling of closeness that you do here.

If you’re looking for a place where everybody knows your name, then Raleigh enables you to do that in a way that some of the bigger cities don’t.

  • This game actually started development as Unreal Engine 3. What has Unreal Engine 4 opened up for your team?

Unreal Engine 4 has a lot of tools within the Blueprint system, which lets designers and artists tinker around and rapidly prototype on things quite quickly. That allows people to take ideas that normally may require an engineer to even prototype out, and they can rough it out immediately in a Blueprint, see how it feels and then see if it’s worth continuing on with development. That is a massive time saver to the development process. That alone is worth it, plus you get all the new graphics and performance. That’s just the cool part of being part of Epic.

  • Has Unreal Engine 4 impacted the look and feel of the actual characters and the cartoonish atmosphere of the game?

Yeah, it definitely has. There are things that we can do with the new engine that just make things better. We always had the same art style in the modern evolution of it, but we’ve been able to really take advantage of that with the new feature set. The thing that’s cool about that is that it’s always an additive. Epic just has a massive quality bar when it comes to art. Whatever they do, they do it all the way to 11 in every case. UE4 just lets Epic take the next generation of what 11 means in this generation on this game to the max. And that’s the cool part about the rolling out this on UE4.

  • How have you seen Fornite evolve since you first got involved with this project?

Fortnite started out as a Game Jam project with a pretty small team. They were iterating away and they had a really cool nugget of gameplay. Then over time, more people got added to the project and they started bring a little bit of their own personality into it. Fornite evolved into a bigger game than it is today, where it has a lot of the epic action, it’s fast-paced and has a lot of the whimsical, zany nature of this particular art style. It definitely evolved from a very small nugget into this truly big project that a lot of people here at the organization are into.

  • How would you summarize it if someone Fornite as a game experience?

Fornite is the distillation of when you were a kid and you were in the backyard woods and building that fortress with planks and boards you found. Then you’re standing on top of it and imagining what it would be like to have all these monsters around you. It captures that childhood feeling of both building a fort and being heroic at the same time.

  • How has the monster gameplay evolved from day to night, whereas originally the monsters were going to come out when the sun went down?

Way back we had this very primal understanding of light and dark. When you’re in the day you’re safe, and when you’re at night that’s the scary times. But over time we started to experiment with the idea. Because if we stuck with that completely then there’s a fixed set of time for day and there’s a fixed set of time for night. People expect that, but the problem is that for combat pacing you want to have shorter fights and you want to have really long fights. If you always sync them up to a day/night cycle you lose some flexibility there. So that caused some interesting problems for us with pacing. So we decided to rely on the weather.

The weather is just as primal as night, plus people know a squall may be a couple of minutes and then it’s fine. But you could have a storm that lasts all night, so it accomplished our game design goals while still maintaining that relatability.