Fortnite Festival

Fortnite Festival and Jam

in collaboration with Harmonix

For Fortnite “Worlds Collide” season, I was embeded in the Harmonix team to help bring Fortnite Festival to reality.

Helped transition musical gameplay from a client-authoritative architecture to a server-authoritative one by creating systems to sync musical timestamps from clients to server, leveraging the metasound system. Added server-authoritative support to both streamed and non-streamed media.
- Added analytics to measure desync lengths and locations (in the media playback timeline) to inform the team and guide fine-tuning of the system.
Created a designer-exposed API and base classes for generic and modular Beat-Synced gameplay abilities with server validation of musical timestamps.
I was exposed to a plethora of new systems (metasounds, quests, UEFN, Split Screen) while working with Harmonix, which required me to deep dive into them and leverage them for different features in the mode. This drastically grew my toolset and enabled me to enhance my and the team’s workflows.

Duration :

The transition to a server-authoritative architecture reduced risk and addressed cheating for the mode, which had a huge impact on fairness when shipped.
The transition also alleviated client performance, deferring core logic to the server and eliminating any duplicated logic that all the clients would perform previously.

Ported the Jam functionality to the Battle Royale mode
- Made the whole port easily hotfixable in different levels of granularity for maximum flexibility when the feature would ship
- Added the neccesary wrappers to make the Jam functionality fully modular and easy to port to a variety of different environments.
Delivered a modular, scalable and risk-minimal solution in a very tight deadline, with a lot of design pivots.
Worked with a high number of stakeholders from different backgrounds to bring this feature to life, which required heavy and regular communication.
Implemented Split Screen support for the feature, while minimizing risks associated with the logic to be introduced.
- This had a heavy impact in the performance of the feature in a split screen scenario, which wouldn’t have been viable in lower-end consoles without extra support.
I was the main bridge between the Jam, Perf/Mem and Battle Royale teams while porting the feature and made sure the direction was aligned with every team’s expectations and requirements.
Made the initial performance analysis of the feature

Duration :

This port had a direct impact on the usability of Jam Tracks, as they would be able to be used not only in Jam Stage and Main Stage, but also in Battle Royale.
This port enabled the team to ship Jam inside Battle Royale with a reduced level of risk due to the modular nature of the implementaiton