Look North World today announced the latest UGC game released through its Creator Label: Tower of Heck: Super Only Up. Tower of Heck is a UEFN creation, accessible to all Fortnite players, and features a vertical obstacle course where sixteen players race to see who can reach the top — if any of them can. While climbing, players collect coins they can use to purchase upgrades for if (when, inevitably) they tumble back down to the bottom. The game launches today on Fortnite’s platform.
FarBridge developed Tower of Heck to be a playground for users to enjoy with their friends, though it’s not without serious challenges. The tower starts off relatively easy, with the difficulty ramping up the higher players go. There are no checkpoints, but the coins players collect and the upgrades they can buy at the bottom of the tower can quickly speed them back to their point of failure.
However, FarBridge executive producer Donald Harris told GamesBeat in an interview that it’s not that serious: “Part of the goal is to have those moments of seeing your friends misstep and just laugh as you watch them fall. The goal is to have a lot of fun and experience those goofy moments… It kind of brings us back to the olden days of game design: Design for fun first.”
Look North World raised $2.25 million earlier this year to help fund the Creator Label, which it uses to help publish and support original UGC titles. Tower of Heck is the latest UGC title to benefit from the Creator Label, which offers developers marketing support, technical advice and hands-on collaboration with the publisher, among other things.
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GamesBeat spoke with Patrick Curry, FarBridge CEO, about the benefits of developing a game for a platform like Fortnite’s, and he cited the accessibility of the platform: “Games are usually very large productions, because they have to be. The economics demand that they are. But to be able to make a smaller, midsize game and launch it everywhere relatively quickly is really new and exciting to us. And with everyone in the world competing for players’ time and attention and eyeballs, being able to say, ‘Here’s a game. We know you own a device that can play it. And it’s free.’ You get a lot of mileage out of that.”
GamesBeat also spoke with Alex Seropian, CEO of Look North World, about its involvement with Tower of Heck: “This project is one of the areas where we are experimenting in new kinds of genres, creating original games, and sort of flexing that part of the business … . We are investing in exploring new kinds of play patterns and genres. We do look at this platform as the most efficient way to create new kinds of games, new IP, new game mechanics, because it’s fast and it’s less expensive. It’s a lower risk.”
Seropian also added, “In this industry, game take much longer, and they cost a lot more. The decision making process is vetted and the higher you go up that scale that the more risk is associated with those kinds of investments. Whereas in this space, I literally think anything is investable. We have way more things that we want to do than we could possibly do… In terms of making giving developers the opportunity to — dare I say — innovate, UEFN is amazing in that way.”
Curry added that Fortnite’s creative platform not only offers tools, but an audience of gamers as well: “We’ve been licensing Unreal Engine for years and making games in Unreal but then it was like, launch your game on Steam yourself, port it to consoles yourself, bring an audience yourself. Bringing the accessible tools and this audience who can see your game on the front page of Fortnite, hundreds of millions of people a month. That’s new and that’s very exciting.”
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