‘Unreal Editor For Fortnite’ Is Now Available In Public Beta: Here’s How It Works

If you’ve wanted to take a crack at building your own video game worlds using the Unreal Engine 5 but you’re not an experienced game developer, now is your chance to shine—or at least to get your creative game-design juices flowing.

Unreal Editor for Fortnite brings the power of the Unreal Engine 5 to the masses—and I’m pretty damn excited to try it out. Here’s how Epic Games describes this exciting new tool:

Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) is a new PC application for designing, developing, and publishing games and experiences directly into Fortnite. Over time, UEFN will evolve to feature most of the same tools available in Unreal Engine. Today in the public beta, UEFN enables a wide variety of games and experiences ranging from highly stylized cel-shaded team combat to ultra-realistic sims, playable right inside the Fortnite you already have installed.

UEFN works side-by-side with Fortnite’s existing Creative toolset, and teams of creators can work together across PC and console to develop and test islands in real-time.

In an expanded press release, Epic also notes that the UEFN makes use of the new scripting language, Verse:

UEFN is a version of Unreal Editor that can create and publish experiences directly to Fortnite. With many of Unreal Engine 5’s powerful features at your fingertips, creators and developers have a whole world of new creative options for producing games and experiences that can be enjoyed by millions of Fortnite players.

What’s more, UEFN provides an opportunity to use the new programming language Verse for the first time. Aimed at getting UEFN creators up and running with the ability to script alongside existing Fortnite Creative tools, Verse offers powerful customization capabilities such as manipulating or chaining together devices and the ability to easily create new game logic. Verse is being designed as a programming language for the metaverse, with upcoming features to enable future scalability to vast open worlds built by millions of creators for billions of players. Verse is launching in Fortnite today, and will come to all Unreal Engine users a couple years down the road.

At the State of Unreal, we also showed a brand new GDC demo that tests the limits of what can be built with UEFN today. The UEFN demo showcases a variety of key UEFN features including Niagara, Verse, Sequencer, Control Rig, custom assets, existing Creative devices, and custom audio.

Obviously, one of the biggest differences between using Unreal Engine 5 and UEFN is that whatever you create with the latter can only be used in Fortnite. This is obviously great for Fortnite creators, but can also be a useful tool for anyone wanting to gain experience working with Unreal Engine 5, Verse and so forth in order to create their own games later.

Epic has already released three maps inside Fortnite built using this new suite of tools:

These are all available to preview and play in the game, which is currently in the excellent new Chapter 4, Season 2. You can head over to the Epic Developer Community Website to learn more. I’m also planning on diving in and seeing just how challenging—or simple?—it is for a relative layman to build fun stuff. I toyed around some with Fortnite Creative Mode but it never really caught my fancy.

For those who do make wonderful mini-games and their own User Generated Content for Fortnite, Epic has also launched the new Creative Economy 2.0 which offers better terms for content creators. Read more about that here.

Finally, Epic has announced a new 3D digital marketplace called Fab:

Later this year, we’re bringing together our marketplaces—Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab, Quixel Bridge, and the ArtStation Marketplace—to launch Fab: a unified marketplace where creators can find, publish, and share digital assets for use in creating digital experiences.

Fab will bring together a massive community where creators will earn an 88% revenue share, and the marketplace will host all types of digital content including 3D models, materials, sound, VFX, digital humans, and more; supporting all engines, all metaverse-inspired games which support imported content, and the most popular digital content creation packages.

Watch the Unreal Editor for Fortnite teaser below:

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