Fall Tower Update - 8/8/24

This "side project" has taken up a ton of my time, however it's much more simpler of a coding exercise than building bingo as a first time Verse coder. As of writing this, I am working on the UI to make it easy to read and understand. So you may be wondering what is Fall Tower? Fall Tower is just like Only Up where you try and get to the top of an obstacle course without falling all the way to the bottom. It is what some would describe as a "Foddian" game, named after Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It.

Fall Tower uses the Fall Guys assets within Fortnite which simplifies the platforming while also making the falls more punishing. It is the only physics pack that has ragdoll physics. Over the past week or so, me and my friend Sparkz on Discord helped with the platforming design. Sparkz mainly helped on the last leg of the tower while I did 80% of it, then I spent my time working on the systems such as XP, Checkpoints and UI.

Other than the level, I started working on making promotional assets for the map. The most important being the thumbnail. The thumbnail is the first thing players will see when scrolling through the Discovery Tab and will pick out ones that look interesting to play.

This is my first draft of the thumbnail. It uses highlights to attract the eyes, The tower looming behind, and big bold letters to make it obvious. A lot of thumbnails in Fortnite Creative right now are made using AI. I don't want to create AI art, so I opted to use my photoshop knowledge to create something. It is okay to say the least, but I hope to get some feedback from my peers over whether or not they would play a map like this.

Overall, it takes a long time to make a map like this that's both interesting and fun to play. I hope to update it in the future with different obstacles and fun mechanics. But that's only if Epic Games is willing to add such mechanics. As of right now, it's very limited on what you can accomplish without Verse code.