 It's hard to escape the omnipresent force that is Fortnite, a game built around survival. This title has become the de facto gaming experience for a young generation, as players have latched onto Fortnite's Battle Royale mode with eagerness. If there's one thing that makes Fortnite stand out from all the other similar games on the market, it's the game's beautifully exaggerated art style. One can easily identify the world of Fortnite simply thanks to its angular props and unashamedly colourful world design. But things were not always so. Back when the game was first put into development, Fortnite was envisioned as a dark claustrophobic game with a horror inspired art style. The play experience was meant to look and feel a lot less fun. This is the story of how Fortnite found its art style and how the game's art director, Peter Ellis, learned to let go of his preconceived ideas of what a game should look like in order to build something truly unique. Peter Ellis wanted to make cool sci-fi art. This was what had driven him to join epic games. As a teenager, he discovered the joys of 3D modelling artwork on computers while studying architecture, and he had built a career around his passion for making cool stuff for various games, including the Gears of War series. Now, with a small team, he found himself charged with the important responsibility of making a survival horror game named Fortnite. The pitch for the game sounded bleak and harsh to say the least. Fortnite was described internally as a survival horror game that makes third person action built around social fortification and a dynamic day-night cycle. Scavenged by day, survive at night. Its Minecraft meets the walking dead in an HBO style world where loners die quickly and extinction is just a heartbeat away. Social survival, work together or die alone. Based on this description, Peter and his team agreed that the game ought to have a dark, oppressive art style to match the scary premise that they were working towards. They began experimenting with gritty, misty, shadowy concept art where horrifying monsters existed just around the next corner and where the player was meant to feel on edge and creeped out at all times. The designs looked appealing and Peter was eager to keep pushing forward. This game style was developing nicely and so the team moved from the concept stage of designing initial art to creating models and textures that made the game world a reality. The very first screenshot of the game shows off this dark world with a nondescript grey building that is bathed in fog as is a large suspiciously familiar tentacle creature hiding among the clouds in the distance. Looking back, Peter likes to joke that he invented the monster from Stranger Things season 2 years before it was debuted to the public. The creature design was similarly inspired by this drab, grey, brown coloured game. The monsters were meant to be genuinely terrifying with an unnerving design that calls to mind the typical horror games that Peter and his team were drawing inspiration from at the time. There was hesitation, even at this early stage, that the premise might be a little worn out by this point. The year was 2011 and zombie horror games were hardly in short supply so some of the team members expressed concern that Fortnite might be a little too cliché in its design. For now, Peter put these concerns out of his mind. The artwork that his team was producing looked good and fit with the kind of work he'd done in games before so he was eager to continue exploring these themes. But then, the realities of the project made Peter rethink things. Fortnite was intended as a game where the player could break down and use the environment to their advantage. They needed to be able to swing a sledgehammer into a wall with pieces crumbling away and wires wooden concrete flying out in all directions in order to sell this idea of dynamic demolition. This simply wasn't possible with such a realistic art style. Modelling the outside of walls and buildings was one thing but in order to make them out of fully deconstructable materials that could be broken apart it wouldn't be possible to stick to such a detailed gritty style. The concerns of the team began to grow larger. Epic Games had play data from their time with the Gears of War series that suggested that players would gravitate towards brighter, more colourful play environments rather than staying immersed in shadows. This went against the whole point of Fortnite as it then appeared. This all seemed like a big mistake. Despite still being part way through development on the game, the team went back and started experimenting with a new batch of concept art. One piece caught Peter's eye, a stylised world that lacked rigid edges and straight lines where everything curved in an exaggerated yet playful art style. Most notably, this image featured a bright blue sky with puffy white clouds which was completely removed from what the team had been doing up to this point. But it worked and it looked inviting and engaging and so Peter wanted to see more. The first step to trying to incorporate this into the game was to take existing objects and models that had been built in the dark, gritty art style and bending them so that they looked more entertaining. The team also worked in Photoshop to brighten their existing textures, making a game that was full of contrast and colour where everything had previously been shades of grey and brown. Peter wasn't too happy with having to do this. It felt wrong to take an asset that had been designed to look one way and warp it until it fit in a different style. Nevertheless, he couldn't argue with the results. He was just going to have to let his preconceived notions go as he experimented with different approaches. Along with this, the team also had to simplify and rework their monster designs. What was once a series of terrifying nightmare creatures now became a lot cuter as the team worked on more family friendly designs for their ghouls and zombies. It was decided that these baddies shouldn't feel genuinely scary or off-putting but instead should give off an air of mischief and cheeky charm. Fortnite was finally announced to the public but the team at Epic Games were unwilling to set a solid release schedule in place just yet. They still had a lot of work to do on modifying their games art design. This would be finished when it was finished, and no sooner. Besides, they kept getting slowed down by other projects. At one point, the team needed to make some art for Game Informer magazine, and this meant a delay to their schedule. They also worked on a few pieces for Apple. These additional side projects were in the service of helping to raise Fortnite's profile, but they also meant that the core creative team had more work on their plate. The most sensible thing to do was to prepare for an eventual release without a set time frame in mind. This turned out to be for the best, as the team had a whole new set of problems that they were about to face. It turned out that not everything fitted neatly into their new, curvaceous art style. The problem with Fortnite's new appearance was that it was sometimes possible to see the cracks in the world. Curvy, slanted props looked great by themselves, but they didn't always mesh together. Peter's team discovered this as they attempted to stack multiple crates on top of each other, only to discover that the models would hang awkwardly in the air without supporting each other, thanks to their unorthodox shape. It turns out that in the real world, sometimes there's a good reason for objects to be straight and level in their design. A similar problem affected the weapons in the game. The stylised look meant that many guns appeared cool at first glance, but they were difficult to aim with. Overly chunky and bendy designs meant that the player couldn't always tell which way a gun's barrel was supposed to be pointing, and this made for a frustrating experience. Peter found a similar problem with his character designs. He wanted everything in this game to fit with the same angular, overly stylised appearance. He was hoping for consistency within all aspects of this world. But blocky, pointy, exaggerated characters didn't always look right. After months of working to make these characters fit the game world, Peter discovered that airbrushing out a few pointy cheekbones went a long way to making the characters look human and relatable. And so, Peter reluctantly learned an important lesson about art design. He couldn't force everything in Fortnite to obey the same rigid design aesthetic, because in real life, not everything matches up perfectly. He had set the rules for the game's visual style, and now he needed to allow his artists to break these rules in order to make more appealing characters, and props that were functional as well as pretty. And so, unshackled yet again, the artists began experimenting with different iterations of the same basic designs. They came up with characters that looked like they fitted into the game world while displaying a lot of personality. To their credit, everyone involved worked hard to create a variety of diverse character models for players to choose from. It was important to the team that the players could see themselves reflected in the world of Fortnite, and this meant creating characters of differing genders, ethnicities, and body sizes. The result was eye-catching and inventive. Fortnite had a truly engaging game world, with compelling characters that quickly caught the eye of players around the world. When the battle royale game boom began to take off, Fortnite's initial survival gameplay was hastily modified, as the developers created a special node that copied similar games like Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. The game took off, and before long, Fortnite became a fully fledged cultural sensation. This was all thanks to Peter Ellis and his hard-working team of artists. While they'd initially started off with a fairly uninspired game design, they'd had the courage to veer in a different direction and make something that stood out. The moral of the story is that sometimes your first idea won't be your best one. It's easy to get excited when you start on a project that matters to you. Often, you can end up charging ahead, ignoring the warning signs that you might be headed in the wrong direction. Don't be afraid to second-guess yourself, to experiment and try new things. You never know when true inspiration may strike. Sometimes, the best way to find your niche is to allow yourself to fail. As you keep working, you will eventually find your own voice and create something you can be proud of.