The Making Of…
An Episodic Fortnite Caper.
The Dawg Town Chronicles games were built in Epic Games’ UEFN toolset. This allowed us to use all the features of this immense toolset to do what we do the way we wanted to do it.
The map was built almost entirely with stock Fortnite assets from their enourmous catalogue. Pulling everything we could find that could look like East London we realised there was plenty of the right ingredients. For the assembly we built something more real-world proportions rather than the huge open boulevards and open spaces so common in games, this gives the whole experience a tighter, more polished feel that still plays great and rewards exploration
Next step was to give Dawg Town a bit of ‘a look’ so we employed the colour grading and post processing effects to pull away from the vibrancy of Fortnite towards something with a bit more of a filmic look and texture. it’s sunny in Dawg Town but not THAT sunny!
Next up was the all-important Dawgs, in Fortnite the players play as them selves wearing their skin of choice so it was vital that we created characters that could fit into the world whilst bringing a disctinct look and feel. Horton designed the characters from various ‘Kitbashed’ models purchased online and textured to feel consistent. Of paramount importance were those cultural references when it comes to fashions that are always a part of Horton and De Rakoff work.
We never set out to motion capture the characters on our zero-budget production instead using adapted material from online libraries, however once things started coming together we knew that real performances would make all the difference. Horton and Derakoff have decades of motion capture experience and Horton is still a working motion capture director so fortunately Target 3D in London offered use of their stage, Horton put on the suit, Derakoff did the direction and we were in and out in a few hours with the raw data. Epics re-targeting tools and latest animation pipeline are world-class so we could get the performances on the screen in record time.
Using Sequencer inside UEFN we added the cinematography to create the memorable cutscenes that feature in the episodes. Horton and Derakoff have film making experience in the physical and the virtual world going back decades sequencer is an amazing tool that with all things UEFN allowed them to put the action on the screen right away.
Dialogue is a huge part of Dawg Town, Derakoff wrote the story for Episode 1 after a jam with Horton discussing themes and gameplay flow. it all started as placeholders in the prototype so we could see how things felt, what runs long? what doesnt land the message? what’s too mechanical, when we’d balanced this all out it was time to find performers and performances. Episode 1 was actually based around peformances into iPhones, Rodney Levelled it up because he had access to a studio which was great. For Episode 2 Horton took a mobile rig to the performers and Derakoff directed these ‘kitchen table’ sessions via Zoom. Modern production is really exciting when you can get great results with minimal studio infrastructure.
Something unique in the current Fortnite creative ecosystem is how we used dialogue in Episode 2. As mentioned before the Dawgs became characters that play alongside the gamers and more importantly they brought narrative and fun through hundreds of lines of dialogue triggered by events in the game. Horton and Derakoff designed the system before Derakoff took on the long task of classic ingame dialogue writing, creating variations up on variations of flavour laden lines to ensure the right level of repetition building familiarity without it feeling like a system of canned clips. Yet again Epic came through with an extremely well implemented audio system that let us put what we wanted ont
