How does Fortnite work?
June 24, 2018 11:33 AM   Subscribe

I'd like to get a basic understanding of how a game like Fortnite / World of Warcraft was designed / developed and ultimately works at scale. Are there any books / videos / blogs that can get me up to speed on how modern multiplayer video games are made / work? I'd like to understand how some of the magic works, e.g. real time game play over the internet, how maps are made, how the physics works, how loot is created, how ultimately a game goes from a hair brained idea to making $300 million a month.
posted by jasondigitized to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
The section on development on the Wikipedia page has a pretty good rundown on how it was developed and scaled. Plus, it has a lot of links to sources that may tell you more.
posted by beagle at 12:20 PM on June 24, 2018


Here's an article about the Fortnite game production cycle. What you may find interesting is how long Fortnite has been in production (since 2011).

Not sure from your question how much you already know, but there is a difference behind the core game (Fortnite: Save the World) versus the version that is currently popular (Fortnite: Battle Royale). So while Battle Royale has been thought of as an "overnight/surprise success", there was a lot of time and effort put into its predecessor before anything paid off.

From a technical perspective, a good place to start is by exploring Unreal Engine 4, which provides a lot of the game logic and graphics for Fortnite and many other popular games over the years. There are a bunch of free tutorials you can browse on Youtube and then there are more rigorous for pay courses that you can find elsewhere.
posted by jeremias at 1:16 PM on June 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Last Thursday's PBS Newshour had this segment on eSports covering DreamHack Austin which had some high-level details.
posted by XMLicious at 7:35 PM on June 24, 2018


Best answer: Glenn Fiedler has a series of blog posts on networked physics which goes into great detail about how to make physics work properly across multiple computers.
posted by panic at 8:45 PM on June 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: You might be interested in some of Overwatch's developer videos, such as this explanation of their netcode (eg: what happens when the player's game disagrees with the server? how does the game handle lag between one player, the server, and another player?).
posted by Gordafarin at 2:54 AM on June 26, 2018


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