Little Red Fortnite Missions
Type: Individual Project
Role: Level Designer
Engine: Unreal Engine for Fortnite
Game overview
This single-player Fortnite experience takes the player on a journey as Little Red Riding Hood to deliver a gift to her sick grandmother. Along the way, she’ll traverse through a cursed town filled with demons, wolves, and cursed townfolk. Lucky for Little Red, her mother has a handy sword to help her, but there’s a twist at the end that even a sword may not help. This 20-minute experience encompasses an attack, fetch, and escort mission that builds up to a branching ending that may reveal the hard truth about the town curse.
Mission One: Attack
To start, I was given a roughly 30-page mission outline that covered the whole narrative, the medieval environment in which the game takes place, the script for all cutscenes, and the gameplay mechanics that are to be introduced.
A large portion of my workflow revolved around using the landscape tool to quickly mold ground, create rough gamespace, and constrain player vision. Since I was given a list of asset packs to work within, I was able to quickly go in with finished assets to block out the space, as well.
Before heading straight into the mission, I collected some reference images that roughly matched some of the assets available to me. Then I followed the specs given to me to create a level design document, which broke up the encounters into chunks, highlighting the layout and encounter pacing. I ended up diverging from this plan pretty quickly once I started playtesting, as I saw some errors with timing, guidance, memory, and pacing.
Sometimes the player did not have a clear enough direction to begin with.
Occasionally, the environment did not feel populated enough…
Or encounters felt disappointing in comparison to the arena’s size.
I finished the mission in about 4 weeks, start to finish. I learned about level sequences, timing, and pacing, which I was able to bring with me into my other project, which I was working on simultaneously, entitled Spirit & Steel. The whole thing turned out to be around 7 minutes, with experienced Fortnite players taking closer to 5 minutes and inexperienced players taking around 9 minutes.
Mission Two: Fetch
I was given another outline for this mission’s specs, including duration, asset, enemy, item collection, pacing, character dialogue, and cutscene requirements. This mission’s focus was on collecting 10 flowers to give to Grandmother. From here, I made a quicker Level Design Document with layout sketches and encounter breakdowns.
With fewer weeks and more content, I did not have enough resources to playtest. Still, I got what I could and towards the end made the most iterations, but some encounters fell through the cracks.
What Happened to Sven?
Less than halfway through the level, there is a note and a plush placed along the path that reveals what happened to a missing boy who was mentioned in mission one.
I planned for this encounter to feel obvious, with the bouquet being straight ahead when the player arrived. Lo and behold, it’s a trick! Once they moved to collect the flowers, fire would suddenly erupt, forcing the player to retreat into a path that isn’t obvious from the start, which would take them to the clues about Sven.
Unfortunately, that is not what players did. They ran straight into the fire to collect the flower, completely missing the path behind them and taking an unreasonable amount of damage.
After multiple quick iterations, I couldn’t get this sequence to be intuitive enough, so I ended up manipulating the landscape to have the player look down on the flower from a slight ledge, with a tree trunk leading the player to the right path.
In the end, it didn’t play as I wanted to, and if I had more time I would have continued iterating, but at least players know the right way to go now that there is better guidance.
Some other areas got a lot of attention…
And some didn’t…
BUT I finished with an experience that fit all specs except duration and accomplished the gameplay goals in a way that works and keeps the player’s engagement for the whole experience. The mission goes about one minute over the 8-minute cut-off on average, with initial playtests taking up to 27 minutes with glitches and sparse checkpoints. I learned about how movement modifiers, vertical levels, and frequent combat impact players.