WE GO is a game built with the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). I have been working in the Unreal Engine professionally for years and started experimenting in UEFN in late 2024. A weekend of prototyping turned into a few months of dedicated development, resulting in a live, published game.
Building the game has been incredibly fun. It’s also a market test to see what potential exists in the Fortnite ecosystem. If the game can find a fan base, WE GO can be expanded far beyond its launched version. Players move swiftly through seamlessly-loaded game worlds, all with different rules and gameplay, and many more worlds can be added to make the game better. It does not play like Fortnite at all, but what’s unknown is whether that will be a strength or a weakness within Fortnite’s ‘Discover’ algorithm.
My interest in this ‘games-as-a-platform’ future emerged as I watched how my teenage kids play games and noticed how different it is from all previous generations. It’s also been hard to ignore the tumult in the games business since 2023. Games-as-a-platform is growing and not much else is.
The appeal for me as a developer is the incredibly short timeline to go from concept to published game. Multiplayer game development is normally the hard-mode of game dev, but combining Unreal with Fortnite’s massive library of assets and game mechanics has unlocked it for me. Epic deserves kudos for what it’s delivered already with the tools. Learning verse, UEFN’s new programming language, has been fast and it’s very well suited to gameplay programming. I’ve been writing verse gameplay code for months, and the test and feedback systems in UEFN have made that time very productive.
In addition to the programming, I’ve done a lot of hands-on game design for the game’s many worlds. There’s also sound design, music production, VFX, world building, and the one thing I’m most used to: game art. The difference here is that each asset has to be made in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Being a solo developer requires an absolute focus on velocity, and maintaining the goal of shipping no matter what.
These assets look a bit out-of-place when shown together. They are all meant for a specific visual context, a specific world. I build the worlds primarily kit-bashing Fortnite’s assets, and then use this art to take it in a different stylistic direction. Lighting and post processing bring it all together.
There is more to come for WE GO. For now, I’m ecstatic that the game actually shipped, and hyped to keep building it with the active player base. It’s completely free to play so if you’re curious to see more, just load up Fortnite and search WE GO.