From Finance to Fortnite's Tycoon King: Sleighted Sloth on Going Full-Time in UEFN

Sleighted Sloth's Journey from Finance to Fortnite Creative Most creators think retention is the main thing that decides if a map succeeds, and most creators think playtime is what drives discovery. Slighted Sloth explains why both of those assumptions can be wrong. Speaker 2 Thumbnail is the most important thing, and the name of the game is probably the second most important because if you're not getting people to click and play your map, the playtime doesn't matter. Speaker 1 And then he shares real examples that might make you think differently about launches. Speaker 2 Swapped out the thumbnail. It was on the Saturday or Friday of being in picks and our CC you doubled. That's all we did is just change the thumbnail. We didn't change anything. Speaker 1 If you're building in UFN right now, this episode might save you months of wasted effort. Let's go. Speaker 2 This is creative. Speaker 1 All right, I think we're in. We're live. Sloth. How's it going? Speaker 2 Great, great. How are you doing? Speaker 1 I'm doing very well brother. Thanks for coming on man. I know this has been a long time coming. I'm super excited to have you. Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Speaker 1 Man, you've been rushing it in UEFN. You do have a lot of successful projects I can't wait to talk about. I know me and you have met in person a few times at the Unreal Festive stuff man. You're amazing creator and a great guy as well. So super excited to have you man. Speaker 2 Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 1 Now let's get started, man. So it's right off the bat. Like one thing that always stood out to me about your story is that you were originally in finance and AT development like, and now you're known for building some of the biggest tycoon style experiences in Fortnite. Like can you walk me through that transition? Like what were you doing before Fortnite and what was that moment where you realized it could be more than just like a side experiment? Speaker 2 Yeah, so I've kind of been just doing my own thing for the most part since like I got out of college. Like I went to school for AG business, surprisingly. And did you say EG agriculture? Sorry, it's my Midwest accent. There's some. Speaker 1 Eggs in business? Speaker 2 And I was like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to be have no body by the time I'm 40. So I started doing mobile app development on the side just learning it. And I did some contract work for the lady that one of the first women to put an app on the App Store on iOS. That's cool. And so I really liked doing mobile development. And then for like the last six years, up until 2024 when I started doing mobile or started doing UEFN stuff, I was working in credit card apps and it was just kind of never exciting. It's, you know, trying to build out the user experiences and make it optimal. And they're all kind of the same, you know, So we, we had done that and I had always wanted to learn game development. I'd played Fortnite since Save the World. Oh OG. So yeah, yeah, I got the founders pack or whatever. Speaker 1 Like amazing, you can sponsor for a lot of money. Speaker 2 And so yeah, I just always wanted to learn game dev and then like, it always felt overwhelming. And then when UEFM came out, I kind of was bummed because I missed out on Creative the first time. Because I remember when Creative first came out, like they had AD day map, like all this cool stuff. I was like, oh, this is going to be really neat. And I never got hooked into it unless I was like, well, I'm not missing this time. And so it's gone really well. And you know, it's enabled me to do a lot of different things that are never would have thought I could imagine to do in my life with game dev. Like I've gotten to work with like the creator of Halo, like I've gotten to go to Denmark for a Lego game jam that was wild this last August. So it's just, I'm just happy to be here. And it's, it's a lot of fun. And it's like, it's really, really small world. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, it is. It's such a it's like a very small niche world and and it feels so, so massive. But if yeah, if you break it down, it, it really is a a small world that they had to been, you know, like how did that feel getting invited to Lego? You know what I mean? Like that is huge. And and you know, we all probably grew you, I'm sure you just like me, we grew up just loving Legos and building Legos. I mean, that had been amazing. Speaker 2 Yeah, it was really cool actually. And I think what helped me get invited to that was that my, one of my tycoons that I made was Island Tycoon on Lego. Like we released it when Lego first came out and we drew a lot of inspiration from the game Lego Island in the 90s even had my like I had a music guy write some similar soundtrack to the actual like Lego Island soundtrack. Wow. Lego liked it so much that it was like one of the first maps in their Lego picks and it was in there for like 6 months. Speaker 1 Incredible. Speaker 2 So I, I think they just kind of were excited and you know, they're just, if you meet like you've obviously met the Lego people, probably they're all super nice. And it was just kind of surreal, little nerve racking because of our child's only a year old and I'm leaving to go to Denmark for a week. But it was so fun. It was so fun. Speaker 1 Yeah, I had to do for business. I'm sure you got him some cool toys, you know what I mean? Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can play with them when he's not going to put them in his mouth. Yeah. Speaker 1 That never goes away. I swear. I find my son, he's 5, he's still got a Lego in his mouth. But it was cool. But I, I also got to go to Denmark as well, not for that something else. And go go to the Lego experience and check out Mill and and they have the their own Lego store there. We can like create custom have like Lego sets there you can't get anywhere else. It was kind of cool. I didn't have enough room in my luggage for all this stuff. Speaker 2 I might have brought some extra room to make sure I could. Speaker 1 That was smart. I should have, I should have brought an extra duffel anyway. No man. Very, very cool, man, Very cool. Blending PvP into Fortnite Tycoon Game Design So you're kind of known for taking a traditional, you know, relaxing drama like tycoons in some sense and making them feel more competitive inside a Fortnite. Like when you started designing a tycoon. What's your core design goals? And like, what are you trying to make players feel in the first like 5 minutes? Speaker 2 I just, I just want them to feel like it's something different. I I don't want to like create something that's just the same as everything else, you know, a copy paste, rinse, repeat. If I had my real way, I'd even make something completely different and go full simulator and make something like Animal Crossing or Dream Live Valley. But I kind of feel like, you know, with our audience, where it's at in UEFN, you kind of have to like meet in the middle somewhere. Yeah, we kind of like Farm Tycoon was one of the first tycoons that used verse persist, like persistence with verse. And so we saved like the rebirths. And So what we do in a lot of our maps is we try to make it different but also similar at the same time. So like we have combat interlaced with our maps, you know. So like if you're playing the tycoon, there's not a lot of tycoons that do this, but ours will have it so that if you eliminate somebody else, you get a chunk of their money. So that's cool. People really like that on our pizza shop tycoon that Jenkins Tiger and I made that, you know, we you could fight other people and take their money and interrupt them while they're trying to deliver pizza and, you know, trying to find those like PvP elements. But then also having that chill side of things because like it's kind of a good way for kids to like play with their parents. Actually, I've learned. Yeah, we have a few bunch of moms that are in our discord and you know, that's something they can play, that's chill. They can step away for 20 minutes, come back and spend more money. You know, it's just fun. Number go up. Speaker 1 Oh yeah, and do I like the you did that for TMNT, right? The the IP that that tycoon and man, I, I, you guys crushed that. I actually loved that TMNT game, that tycoon and like how you use use the IP to make a really fun game loop. And you know, even at the time, you know, I don't think there was a very large pops from the TMNT like we've seen on some of the other IPS, but your game did. Speaker 2 Yeah, that thing him did really, really well like that kept things going for a while. In fact, that was one of the really nice things while I was going full time. It really popped off so much so that it we even had it featured like an epic had done real fast. They had jank come up and talk about it. And I think what did really well about it it was it was very connected to turtles, right? You had the pizza delivery, but then you also had it connected to Fortnite. Like you could have them delivering pizza and then you could shoot the people delivering pizza. And so like there was a nice little like tight combat loop there, but also a lot of like silly little like stupid things. Like one of some of our upgrades in the bases were like a pile of boxes, you know, just a lot of sarcastic humor. Oh. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, you, it was, I felt like I legit was felt like I was a pizza delivery guy pizza store. It was it was incredible. You guys crushed that map and so many others. You've you've been involved in the taiku genre. You really are like top level. If you guys haven't anyone listening, you haven't checked out some of these maps, Definitely go check them out. We'll definitely talk a little bit more about some of some of those things. Understanding Fortnite Player Spending on In-Island Purchases Fortnite has a very specific type of player compared to people who play traditional tycoon games like Roblox and mobile. Lot of similarities, sure, but like, it's definitely different, right? You, we, we, we have different rules. We have the characters we have to work with and the weapons we have to work with. When you design for Fortnite players, like what do they tolerate less or and also like is there things that they surprisingly love? Speaker 2 Yeah, I'll tell you one thing that was a little surprising was when we had in the island transactions come out, I would have thought that players wouldn't have tolerated that because they've been in, we haven't had them in for yeah, they've never been here. But actually we had more when we had grow farm and picks, right? We had more, we had more. I mean, I don't know the full numbers yet, right, Because it's at the end of the month is when we get our payout. But our like result from the in island transactions was more than the engagement pay. Like that's really shocking that like, you know, they have no problem spending V bucks and maps. Like we had over 2 million V bucks spent while it was in pics. People also do it because they want to support you. So I think it's really cool because that's going to like open up a lot of alternative avenues for people to be able to like do this and make money. And, you know, maybe you said like we're talking earlier, you don't need 5000 CCU. You could have a couple 100 CCU. Yeah. All these things add into the experience and make us be able to create different opportunities to, you know, bring in revenue. Speaker 1 Yeah, no. And look, thank you for bringing that up. A lot of creators I think are keeping a lot of of that information and data right now. It's also very new, right? It's like a month old, but like I haven't been able to talk to many people or, or I talked to people behind the scenes and I've, I've heard stats. I'll keep, I can't say those out loud, but like, you know, you're the first creator to even talk about it. So thank you for sharing that. And I, I want to actually dive more into that here in, in the next coming questions, because that is fascinating. And I think a lot of creators are kind of on that fence. I've heard both sides of the coin. And so, you know, I, when it, when it comes to me, I, I think IIP, we, it is a path that we need in this space. It's on every other platform. And it, we need more ways to generate revenue for not only our developers, but also, or start even thinking on the brand side of things. This is going to be interesting, another lever they can pull to also generate revenue. So I think overall in the ecosystem is great. And not to mention all the money spent is put back into the, for this first year, put back into the, the pot for the engagement pay. So I mean, I again, I think I think Epic's doing it right. And and I honestly never thought I would see IAP in Fortnite or or at least this early. Speaker 2 Yeah, it kind of came out of nowhere. It was surprising. Hadn't there looked like, Oh yeah, we're doing this next month and then it was just a month, but that's still like nothing. Speaker 1 Yeah, it was crazy. Is is building is the I know they have the tutorial inside of UEFN to create the shops and things and they have a nice little tutorial like is building these shops. I think you have to. It has to be inverse, right? Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, it's all inverse, but it's actually in my opinion. I'm of course, I'm a programmer, so it's easy to, but if you don't, I'll shout out my buddy trick. Tiger's got a tutorial for it on Twitter, like he's even or X that shows how people how to set up in our own transactions. So it's really not too scary, not too intimidating. Speaker 1 Amazing, definitely check that out. If you're not following tricky as well. You go go follow, go follow him. He's amazing. He's been posting really cool tutorials and and also another good fella. Well, like I said, we'll dive a little. We'll go a little more in depth than that in a minute. Building Addictive Retention Loops for UEFN Maps A lot of creators say they are building for retention like but everyone seems to mean something different when they say that like. What retention loops do you personally trust the most right now, and which ones do you think creators overuse because they feel safe? Speaker 2 Yeah, I would say I think the ones that I really, really rely on, like we just want to make sure like, you know, you can keep playing the tycoon and keep like progressing. The rebirth system is like something every tycoon should have because it's just even though, especially in our current ecosystem, right, you can only make it so expense extensive of a tycoon. So like allowing them to rebirth and start over is really an easy feature to implement. And then you can add benefits to that. Like we let people make more money in the game. And so it's just like number go up faster and faster and faster. And I think that's one of this, you know, every tycoon does typically use and should use. Other than that, I think we try to make it cooperative play, whether that's like PvP or like you can help other people. Just something to get people to interact, because if you have other people to interact with, it's they're more likely to play, right? Like nobody wants to play a dad game. Nobody wants to sit there by themselves. They just like to mess around with friends and make friends. That's you know, some of that that's why we game is to make friends and meet people. And we've had a lot of people that haven't made become friend met each other through our pizza shop tycoon. There's a nice little group there and I think like for retention that maybe is overused. I don't know. We don't really do the daily rewards. Speaker 1 As much as a hard one, yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, but I I don't know if those really add enough yet to really be a huge benefit and maybe they do. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 I, I want to try it sometime, but I think in our current ecosystem like this isn't like Clash of Clans where you, you know, you have a million different upgrades. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 So I think there's there's more to come and I think just trying to make a tight, addictive game loop is more important than anything. I think just making it fun, that's what's your attention, right? If people enjoy it and they don't feel like it's grueling, like we pace everything out, we make sure like that everything scales appropriately so they're not waiting two hours or 50 minutes for an upgrade, you know, to unlock. Like there's always something to do on whether that's in your base or with other people. Like we try to make it so that you can kind of play it different ways. Speaker 1 Yeah, no, that, that's, that's perfect. And, and, and yeah, just just it's it is hard with our memory limits we have and I'm sure a scene graph will maybe help was going to help with a lot of that, that stuff. But yeah, like compared to Roblox, you can they can just build just a really vast tycoon system and and have PvP in it. Like I think military tycoon is a really big one on Roblox and straight up you build your base, you build your your, your weapons, your arsenal, your, your jets and then there's a PvP area and you go fight. You know what I mean? And it's really hard. I mean, I at a large scale of players, you know, probably to build current in our current current, you know, engine we have. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's definitely a challenge. Speaker 1 So, yeah, I, I can imagine, but yeah, definitely a rebirth, you know, I mean, I, you see a lot of that. I mean, that's a main focus on, on like steal the brain rot, for instance, that that's a that's a huge driver there. And yeah, I don't know, all all those things are pretty interesting. And I don't know, I love, I love talking about retention. How do we keep players coming back and and tycoons definitely hold a lot, a lot more average play time and seem to have a lot higher retention than a lot of other games. But also it's very few tycoons that we've seen that last a year in this ecosystem. Yeah. Speaker 2 It's challenging right now. I know like you know, when we had Farm Tycoon that actually did really well and made like some decent money monthly with even just the browse row, but they took that out. So we don't have the farming browse row. And I think think Tycoons, especially in general, I think that I wish we had more browse rows because there's a lot of smaller craters that benefited those. You could get 50 to 100 CCU just from browse and like that really did well the surface new maps. And so I kind of missed that. Some of those rows are really nice. Speaker 1 I'm glad you brought that up. Mastering Thumbnails for Map Discovery and Click-Through You know what I mean, because yeah, I, I, I didn't, I didn't think about that impact. I know the new discovery is it changed a lot. It definitely changed a lot in how players find maps. You know that it's now it's just categories and those categories. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how far we want to get into this. Let's let's talk about discovery. Let's let's get. Speaker 2 Into it. OK, sounds good. Speaker 1 So what do you think creators misunderstand most about how maps actually get momentum, especially in that first wave after launch? Speaker 2 Yeah, I think and I've even fallen guilty to this too. But I think the biggest thing, especially in the current ecosystem that is missed is click through, right? Yeah, you know, thumbnail is the most important thing. And the name of the game is probably the second most important because if you're not getting people to click and play your map, the play time doesn't matter. It's like what is 1000 CCU to get into certain rows? And then you have like 2000 and then the lower requirements couple 100 right, to get into the next rows. Like all of that. If you don't have click through rate, like you could have a 90 minute play time and if you don't have to click through rate, it's not going to go. So I think, you know, missing on the importance of getting a really good thumbnail and there's a lot of different thumbnail artists out there, but focusing on something that's going to get your target audience to click is like the number one thing. And then after that, of course, you can go into stats like is it going to, you know, how are you keeping people in those first couple minutes? What's your average play time that that keeps that metric keeps moving, right? Like there's a lot of like ghost gaming. I think it is they have that super pet world. Like they got like a 90 plus minute playtime average. Like those metrics are gonna keep going up. So we have to make sure we're building games that are addictive and like fun, and they keep pushing that boundary. Speaker 1 Right, Yeah, yeah, Actually surprising enough, I think the next episode and if you're listening will actually be about, I have Brian coming on from Ghost Gaming and we talk about that, that game. But yeah, I think what you said is, is very important for creators listening. And even Kevin and from Fog came on here and, and, and it's like when we were in Epic Picks, we had like 4 thumbnails ready and we tested them and they got a lot of good data out of that and really found out like what their best thumbnail was. And I think a lot of creators, they just stop at 1 thumbnail and it hurts them. And definitely, definitely test. Definitely. We have AB testing now too, right? So yeah, easily that's just like easy stuff. And and again, you're right, the title, that's it. That's a huge thing. John came on, talked about the your description, like I think it was like 400 something characters had like night like 90 more percent success rate or something than just a short, short characters, things like that. So there's definitely little things you have to make sure you do you have the best game in the world, right, But you had those are the things you have to hit on top of it to to get you get that momentum to get it where it's going. It's. Speaker 2 Huge. It makes a big difference. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Is is there anything you can remember on some of your games, like like a small change you made on on one of your games that kind of like helped it get in discovery or boost anything in metrics? Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, we even just had this with Grove Farm is the thumbnail. We had a not very good thumbnail and we didn't unfortunately we didn't have, we tried to reach out to a couple people ahead of time, but we didn't get it ready in time. But we we swapped out the thumbnail. It was on the Saturday or Friday of being in pics and our CCU doubled. That's crazy. That's all we did is just change the thumbnail. We didn't change anything, you know, and our CCU average doubled and it was higher the rest of the pics run than it was before that. So, so that's why I think like CCU, why is like getting people to play your game. The thumbnail is literally the most important thing. Speaker 1 Listen, that's crazy. And and that yeah, I mean that that just could be your problem in your list and that could just be it. That could be that simple. And just that there's a there is a lot of thumbnail artists out there. I think the the thumbnail artists that are working with the top games, you know, they're probably a little more expensive and probably, you know, going to have a longer time to get those back. But there's definitely, you know, early on when I was making games too, I I would, I had not this a problem, but I had the same problem as well as just like trying to find. I found like a an awesome artist who wasn't like widely known, but just super talented and she no longer makes thumbnails, but she was incredible and some of the top thumbnails are still her thumbnails she made. I got her in touch with, you know, that's the other thing that happens once you get one good thumbnail artist and he. Speaker 2 Will see that they're snagged. Speaker 1 Yeah, and they're, they're taken. And I love what Graham said. One of the episodes is just like, once you get somebody that's doing a great job for you, tip them well, do it well. So when you're when you talk to them, they're going to be the first person to talk to you. But no, that's, that's that, that that's great advice. And I think people listening should take that to heart. Driving Map Momentum with Off-Platform Social Media But what do you think creators misunderstand most about a map actually getting momentum, especially in like the first wave after launch? Speaker 2 I think probably the thing people don't see is that those maps usually have a lot of promo off platform, right, like a lot of on TikTok, YouTube. And actually that's something that I want to try to focus on over the next year is be better at that because like we've been thankfully successful without any of that. But I think that's what we're seeing change as there's so many more creators in the system now that like you have to be promoting your game and get people from, you know, social media to be like, Oh, I want to come check that out. Like there are a lot of maps and people with other creators will show it. Like they'll say like, Oh, I can show you this spike in CCU is when we had this video on TikTok blow up. Like I think that's something everybody should be focusing in on. This is how can you, you know, get people to play your game, not necessarily just discover because sure, and I think that's hard. That's the biggest challenge of all time, right? Because if you're not in discovery, you're not, you're not necessarily having crazy CCU. But there's plenty of people that do who like, you know, there's always other options that help. Yeah. Speaker 1 That that that's a great point and anyone listening knows I'm always harping on that on on this whole from media side of things, and it is tough. I mean, even, you know, things have changed since I was, you know, I've, I've gotten millions of views on a lot of some of my trailers from my games and it definitely helps. It definitely hits the spikes. I mean, early creative, we didn't have a discovery. So that was discovery. You had to have social media or no one was playing your game, right. So, and it's also just it's we don't have the tools necessarily for people to bring people off platform. We got the direct linking. We do have a few tools, but still it's it's still hard to get someone, you know, Roblox. I could not have it Roblox download at all. I could in five. In less than 5 minutes I could be playing a Roblox experience. Speaker 2 Yeah. And they're working on that with Fortnite to have the lighter, lighter download and they'll get there. But because that is huge. Like it's crazy. You go to Roblox and it like takes 2 minutes to download be in a game. Speaker 1 Oh yeah, yeah, apparently they did think line on mobile or they're some somewhat on mobile, which is very awesome, right. You don't have to download 100 gigabytes or whatever it is to download Fortnite and then on top of the game and clear off your half your phone memory first where you do that. But definitely that I think that's going to really help us though, from the social media side, because they're just there's so many blocks or or reasons for people that just do not play your game just from from your social media posts. So that's going to be nice when we actually do have a legitimate way to direct link games and within a few minutes they can play that. That's going to help so much. But yeah, social media is hard and you, you look, you it's you all can make a cool trailer for a game, but that even that really hard to pull players to your game. You have to have, you know, a lot of you will have incentives like cool new weapons or events or, you know, something new or different than they haven't seen that looks fun with their friends. But but that's just it. I get that's the best feeling is when you post, make those posts and you see that folder, people are saving it and they're tagging their friends. Let's play this like that. That's awesome. And Epic is doing things on the community side of things and trying to keep give us more tools for internally to talk to our players. I know that's a huge driver right now for a lot of it. It helps everyone out, but it's definitely helping the top creators probably more just because they have the larger followings and things like that. But for sure, those the games you follow now, you get a little message about the new yeah, that's huge too. Speaker 2 People have asked me like, what did you guys update? I'm excited about the community feature. I think if people use that more, that'll be nice. You know, the other thing is I'm guilty of it. I'm always trying to add more to my maps. I think the biggest thing that I'm excited for this next year is I think with all that's on the road map, you know, with a new virtual machine for first all of the scene graph improvements. I really think that we're going to get to a point where like, obviously right now, the current success is make something similar to what's in Roblox, right? But like this is the AAA of UGC like this isn't this isn't Roblox. And so I'm really excited to see like, you know, what people do over the next year because I think that we all can make better things. Game that's obviously really hard and like I'm still really bullish on it because like, in what other world can you, you know, create a game and have thousands of people playing it? Like even AAA games with multi $1,000,000 budgets don't see the CCU that some of the maps that are in Fortnite. Like it's a really cool opportunity that we're that we have here that we can just do this. And like, this is my job. I made this my career. Like, yeah, it's, it's challenging and there's peaks and valleys, but it it's the most rewarding thing ever to somebody tell you how much fun they had, You know, what your game you made made a difference for them. And and that's, I think what we just have to keep focusing on is what's fun and like find that person that we want to have fun, make fun for. Envisioning AAA UGC and Cross-Platform Gaming in UEFN Yeah, it's definitely good to stay grounded like and have have those thoughts. It's it's a lot of us started we wouldn't even think about you can make money in this space was just for fun and and we love doing it. And now obviously they publish the numbers of how much money you can make and they're trying to get AAA devs. They're trying to get bigger team in these. They're trying to get anybody come over here and create their games in here, which is understand you understand that from the business side, but it's just I don't know. It's hard, right? It, it's, it's a hard ecosystem because on one hand, you're right, like we can build AAA games at some capacity and a lot of us, that's the games we want to build or want to even play on this platform. But but also it's just not, you know, those games also take a long to have a long dev cycle, right? And when you're needing to provide for your family, sometimes you have to make different decisions. But at the end of the day, I love what you said and, and, and, and we forget it. And I, I remember when I first my first few comments on this game, Dude, I love this game. I play with my friends. Thank you. You know, all, or I met so many people here and made new friends and I've gotten better at Fortnite because you're getting whatever, like all those comments and you're just like, Oh, this is crazy. And then you get keep, you know, once your game's in this ecosystem, you know, I made games eight years ago and you're like, man, that was my childhood. Like I had, I've had old comments on my original 1V1 YouTube video, you know, it has a million views and they're like, dude, this was my childhood. You know, whatever, that's insane to think about, right? Because like, what games was your childhood? But you know what, what, what's that game for you? And you think about it. Speaker 2 Probably my biggest game in my life was like awkward enough time or like Majora's Mask. Speaker 1 Twins or some Classics 100? Speaker 2 Percent game. When I got Majora's Mask, my younger brother and I couldn't complete it for like a year because we get so scared of the moon resetting. Yeah, we have nightmares, but you know, like, it was so much fun. Yeah. It was like that was such a huge time in like gaming when we went from like to 3D worlds. Speaker 1 In the 60. Speaker 2 4 Crazy makes me feel like a dinosaur in the gaming room. Speaker 1 No, I know. I mean, we, I got people coming talking about Ataris on here. So we're we're not that old yet. Hey, hey. Speaker 2 We're still young like that. And then the Game Cube and Night Fire and Goldeneye snappers. Only this classics. Speaker 1 For sure, 100%. I mean that that's my childhood. And then Halo. Speaker 2 Yep, Yep, I still remember the day my friend brought Halo 2 over and his Xbox like that, that game blew my mind as a kid. And then like my younger brother and I spent all this time like learning all the different insurance and outs and how to break out of the map. Like there were so many maps you could get out of the edge from. And that would be my dream is to create something that's iconic, you know, and like those games really shaped a lot of people's experiences and got people interested in gaming. And I think, I think sometimes people get lost in, like, trying to make something that makes money and yeah, instead of trying to make something that's fun and cool and new, like, that would be the dream to make something that like, you know, eventually transcends just the platform you're on, Right. And yeah, maybe you go into books or movies. Like that would be the coolest thing ever. Speaker 1 Like make that key toy, whatever, whatever, for sure. And and they're doing that on Roblox. They are 100% doing that already. It's it's a possibility and it's a matter of time. It'll it'll happen. And I think, you know, Epic's also preparing for the future with verse and you know what, whatever the metaverse definition you want to insert, but man, that I think they're definitely a leading that that pack right now. I mean, maybe not in CC us, but I think in engine capability and cross play. I mean, Fortnite's the first game that allowed us to play with PC, Switch, PlayStation. Speaker 2 That's crazy to think about. Like people think that's just normal now, but like I remember that being a huge stink when they like wanted to make it work between PC or Xbox and PlayStation and the Switch, like that was never been done before. Like no, then there was never a game until like Fortnite there where you could play it on every platform and actually play. Like that was so cool. Like, you know, I only had a Switch at the time and that I could play it on Switch and my brother could play on his Xbox. Like we could play together and talk to each other across platforms. Like that's huge. Speaker 1 Crazy. Your friend group, it was like, I got an Xbox, I got Nintendo, I got PlayStation. We can't play together, you know what I mean? I got to go over my friend to play Saga, you know what I mean? Like I have a Nintendo and like we didn't have now. Yeah, yeah. We didn't even have Discord either, so we couldn't, you know? Speaker 2 I have Teamspeak, do you remember? Speaker 1 Teamspeak. Yeah. Oh my gosh, I haven't thought about that in a long time. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was in like a clan in like high school playing games online and we use Teamspeak all the time. And it's, you know, it's so nice now how connected we can be with stuff like you can have Discord and chat. Speaker 1 Yeah, Discord's on PlayStation I think, and Xbox you can just get on and talk to. It's, it's, it's amazing, man. We we definitely have gone to the the future that we couldn't even imagine that now it's just what we all take for granted everyday. Speaker 2 Wild to think about. Like, I can't even imagine like some games, like, you know, like our graders is huge because of cross-platform. Like you can play with people on PC, Xbox, like, yeah, that's just common now on games like in. I'm super glad it is. And I'm glad Fortnite paved the way for that because it's it's kind of it's a big deal, you know, especially like during COVID when people couldn't see each other. Like gaming is a way to connect. It always will be. Speaker 1 It's huge and and COVID I think really pushed our industry, not just Fortnite, a lot of games, but more on the social. It's always been a social aspect, but like tenfold, you know what I mean? And and I think that helped out. I can't imagine COVID without gaming and being able to talk to your friends. You know what I mean? And it was a big part for me, like when I I worked remote for 17 years and I had very bad Internet, but I'd still get on my A game and I could hang out with my friends and play games and chat. You know, it was yeah, it it helps out more than more than anything. But let's get back on talking about Fortnite. Essential Steps for a Successful UEFN Map Launch Look, I love this stuff too, man, I know. But like when you look at your own launches now, you clearly approach them very differently than most creators. What are the non negotiables for the first week like both inside the game and outside the game? Speaker 2 Yeah, so I've seen this with some creators. They don't test thoroughly before they launch. They look at that first launch as the test. And honestly, that first launch is not the test like you should have tested the way before that. Speaker 1 Oh yeah. Speaker 2 So like then that's a non negotiable as they're. Speaker 1 Looking at that, everything works for the algorithm I believe as well if it's been tested. Speaker 2 Yeah, they, they do. Look how much time you spend on it. That's that's something that we focus on big time. We play it and make sure it's balanced before we launch a thumbnail. I'm not a thumbnail artist, so I just accept that I can never make a good thumbnail. And so that's something that in our experience, like that first launch is the most critical launch and sets the stage of how much you're going to make for that game. If you're not ready for that first launch, that can break it entirely. You'll might not ever see a huge discover run again. And it's discover has gotten a little bit better where it well, you can get in an updated row again, but that first launch is the best time to get pushed. Like you need to look at dot GG and see like that's when they get the most promo is that first push. Like that's really going to be the make or break for your game. So the stability and making sure everything's ready to go and having like you said, the description, everything up to date, like you have to consider that first launch very, very seriously and not just casually launch it in my opinion. Speaker 1 Yeah, no, that, that's a great answer. And yeah, I think it's, it's hard. They're finally giving us a little bit of tools to test with, right. I haven't used them very much. I don't know. Have you, have you used their internal tools now the testing that they give have given us? Speaker 2 Some of it's OK, but really the best thing to test is with other people and yeah, devices like. Even the test player feature, it's not the same like inverse, it's not the right, like it's not like a regular player agent. So you can kind of test some stuff with that, but it's just not quite the same. But you know, the nice thing is, is we have a private. You can build private builds and you can even launch unlisted now, which, you know, we didn't have right away. Yeah, that all that really helps a lot because each environment functions a little differently. And so you can have a feature that you think works fine in your session or in private build, but then when you get to actually launch it and be in public build, it doesn't work. So you know that testing is just the biggest thing. So it's really huge. And that's like, I think that's what's helped me in my career is like, I've come from programming and I know, you know, you got to make sure everything works, especially in the credit card industry. You you can't. Oh yeah, I have issues, right? Like people need to make their credit card payments. There's a lot of, there's a lot of legalities around finance. And so, you know, having that as my background, I think it's really helping make sure that like stuff that I produce works well from the start. And we still have issues, you know, like everybody. But I think that making sure everything works is just really, really, really crucial. Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think a lot of creators too, and they they find this out too late. But like your game works in private a lot, but then when it goes live and published it, it acts differently like the joint progress, all these things like it's, it's a like a whole new learning. It's so hard to test that as well, right? I mean, you can, it's good to test them in private and then give people, add people to your test server or whatever or test group and then and then try. You can probably minimize a lot of those. But yeah, how was your experience with like lot that? You know what I mean? Testing a published game now after it was working just fine in the editor. Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I'm used to that, right from working on apps like that. You have a production pipe dev to production pipeline and so that you have to test everything repeatedly. And, you know, I think that a lot of bigger groups should, if they're not doing this, use test cases and build out testing plans because, yeah, even in general, like, you know, keeping track of like what issues you've had with prior updates and testing. I think another like after release, it's important is that you need to test every time there's a big Fortnite update because yes, like we're not there yet. What's getting better? But like it's still so tightly connected to Fortnite that like they change something VR, it can break your game and they don't need to. And I and they're creating groups to help with that. They're creating stuff to help with that, right. But like you just have to test occasionally, like with every update, because you could be just fine. And then the update comes out and breaks. We had that with grow farm where they right before break, they had a bug come out on scene graph and so we had to delay. We had to get them. Thankfully they were able to delay our epic picks because it like we have a garden, it's a growing game, right? So like to harvest plants and the interaction wasn't working. It was broken and sounds like, well, we can't, you can't play the game if that doesn't work. So, you know, making sure you test that stuff because if we didn't test it, we wouldn't have known that that was an issue and could have potentially lost an entire picks run, you know, because we have what we didn't know about. Speaker 1 No, and and that is that is definitely great advice and it in in that that has happened from early Fortnite creative every every update and I should say every update. There's updates that don't, don't mess with it, but it doesn't matter after every update, you got to test your map as soon as you can. And not only that, usually the update provides it depends on your game, but like new weapons or new items and you want to have those in your game as well. It's definitely something you you should be doing. And I hear a lot of people and I've, I've heard, I've heard this so much in it and actually I can't. It drives me nuts. But like when you know, oh, Epic broke my game, I'm going to wait till they fix it. You know what I mean? That and that, that that mentality and and I and I get it, I understand, but like epic care, they'll fix it, but they got their that's that's not their focus usually at that time. It's their new Fortnite update there. That's that's what they care about at that time and they might get to it. And if it's a huge issue across all maps, then they might revert or whatever it is. But you cannot have that mindset. You have to have good people like Sloth here that understand the ecosystem and understand how to make a button again. And maybe they fix it, whatever. But this is just the example I'm using. How to go make a? Speaker 2 Different type of place rely on that you know, you have to be able to pivot and find some even a super janky. You know, you have to make it work and sometimes that's what we do. Sometimes my code is really ugly, but it works. So yes, you know, I think trying to find and a solution is, like you said, is way more important than just being quick to blame Epic, because in that week or two, whenever that time period is that you're waiting for them to fix it, somebody else can take your spot. So yeah, you know, it's very competitive to. Speaker 1 Kill your kill your game and and somebody's going to figure it out or find a way around it. Generally, right? No, it's it's very, very important to think about it. It sucks and I'm I'm excited for the day where we get to, you know, opt in updates for your games and stuff. So our version versioning right? Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 Maybe that'll limit some of that stuff, make our update days a lot less hectic. Because right now, if you have a game that's well, one, if you have a game that you're trying to get successful or you have a successful game, you're getting up very early on update day to make sure your game is working. All right, let's I want to talk about designing for spiky platform. Adapting to Fortnite's Spiky Platform and Device Testing So you have said before that you basically get one shot. You already said earlier, right? And sometimes a second spike with picks, right? How do you design your game and your update plan knowing the platform behaves this way? Speaker 2 Yeah, I think honestly that we kind of use that first launch to decide whether or not we want to keep adding more to a map or not. Like, you know, I've, I've kind of felt guilty of wanting to keep updating my stuff, but if it doesn't connect with players or doesn't do well, sometimes the answer is you don't update it. Sometimes you just walk away from it. And I think as creators, I'm guilty of it. We all need to be better about knowing when that time is and it's. Speaker 1 Not your darling. Speaker 2 Gonna answer, but you know, like sometimes you have to walk away from it and try something else. There's always something you can take away from that game and do better for the next one. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 So for us, it's really just that first launch. If it does well, then, you know, that tells us what more we can do. But. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 It's other than that, it's like there's not much else you can do unless you can promote it and get people off off platform. But I think that that discover launch tells you to what if people would play it. If you know you don't want to sink into a game that's got you have to have like good retention or good play time. Good click through rate, you have to have one of those things to be able to prop it up because it's you look at Discover, there are some maps that have 20 minute playtime averages, but they have really high retention, right? Or really high click through to where is the second they hit Discover bang it shoots up to 2000 CCU. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 You know, so sometimes you can tweak some of that, but that first run tells you whether that's worth the time to invest into, you know, promoting it or maybe pivoting I. Speaker 1 Think yeah, yeah, it's and that, that that is hard. That is really hard, especially if you invest a lot of time and energy into a game. And we, if you're really new to and you don't have to set the proper hooks in your game, use your analytic devices, know how to read some of your data early on too, that those things can kind of help you to try to find. Maybe, maybe it's something simple, like I think Pixelated was on the the previous episode and he was saying like the flashlight on the horror game, like when he crouched and it got off the screen, it dropped. You know, it looked his FPS went way down, like it was tanking his FPS. And so there's just like sometimes it can just be a little things that you might not know and it might, it might be worth. But again, if you were testing beforehand, maybe you can get ahead of these sort of things. But yeah. Speaker 2 You bring up a good point. Yeah, because that actually reminds me of when I first started. I made a moon gun game and I did like custom and lighting and stuff in UFN and had a really cool like you're in the shadow of a K in A in A like you're in the moon. And I did not test it on Switch and it cut my play time in half because only on the Nintendo Switch was there a lighting bug where it was just pitch black. Yeah, that's something I think people miss too. Is that like when I see as I fixed that my play time doubled? Speaker 1 Testing on lower end devices. Speaker 2 Yeah. So this is huge. You don't think about that. The lighting is like kind of be a curse and a blessing, like it's makes things look really cool. But also like sometimes if you don't test on lower end devices or test performance mode, I forget to do that sometimes. But sometimes the issue could not be your map. It could be in a bug that you have because it's not working on Switch or it's not working in performance mode. Like, you know, maybe you have something on in your onboarding that's broken because of performance mode. Because unfortunately, whether you want performance mode or not, like people have it, right. This is a competitive ecosystem and so many people use performance mode because they want peak FPS. So like you got a test in that? Speaker 1 100% that's that's been a problem from day one and it it sucks because you make really cool looking maps or games and they put on performance mode and you're like, what does this look? And you know, it would be really cool. And I don't, and maybe, you know, maybe it's possible, maybe I don't know, but if you could actually get signals from what, what performance mode, if they're on performance mode in game, it'd be kind of cool. Speaker 2 I don't know if we can yet, but I know that will I've, I've heard that that's coming to where like you can check, which I mean, that would be awesome, right? Like if we could have certain things in verse where we could say like, you know, whether it's performance mode. Performance mode also will affect like the number of Lods on a model. So some of that you can tweak. You know, some of some people don't realize like if you import custom models, like some performance mode stuff like just cuts it off after a certain amount of triangles. But like you can go in there and actually like in UEFN, you can reduce triangles on models and like sometimes you can reduce 80% of the triangles and it looks just fine. And then it'll show up and work well in performance mode. You know, so like there are some optimizations you can do to, you know, save space and make your game more performant and then make it look the same for everybody. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And this full circle it, it really is tough to know when to, you know, shelf your game if if it's but saying all saying all that, and I I do think if your game's not doing what you thought it was to do off launch and you've tested it, it's not nothing obvious or broken. You know, try to look at your metrics, try to look at 490 GG, seeing what their metrics are. See if you can kind of like, OK, I'm not hitting the retention, I'm not hitting them some of these metrics. And and that's also hard a little bit too as well because you got to remember, yeah, at the start of your game when there's not a lot of players, you're going to have a higher average play time, right? But then when more people come in, it's going to lower that much more. And so it's just, it's really. And that's why you see a lot of these posts. I have this average play time and I'm nowhere in discovery. Well. Speaker 2 It means because you got 50 players or something, you know? Yeah, small amount of play your. Speaker 1 Game for three hours now you. Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 A bad joke, but but yeah, it just again, it's just kind of paying attention to those things. And and again, if you're brand new and you're just I think and you can you know, you can whatever to chime into this, but it's like it's more important, I think just to do your best, get it out there, learn as much as you can from that experience and try again. Like how many maps did you make in UEFM before you kind of got your first OP of CC us? Speaker 2 Well, luckily not a lot. I did 2 gun games and then after that I did like those infinite ramps had terrible play time, like 15 minutes, but it looked like a Hot Wheels track thing where you like took the to the octane. Yeah, you took the octane and you like could run upside down and do loops and stuff. And that actually had a crazy good click through rate that had a couple thousand CCU. And then like Farm Tycoon was my first big one and that was only gosh, I want to say we launched that. I went to Unreal Fest in New Orleans and had a really good talk. I think it was Jay that talked about, you know, spicing up your game and making it better. And we did a few things from that for from tycoon, like you could pet your animals and stuff and just little things like the plants would bounce and they'd animate in. And that map had like 5 + 1000 CCU. So that was our first big map and within like 6 months that I had. So that was really cool. So I think I think that's also something that should be highlighted is that people that are new to the platform, even if you're coming from AAA game dev, like you have to look at like the platform and what works and make something that's a mix of what works and like what you want to do, right? Like 'cause I think sometimes we felt guilty of just making what we want instead of trying to make something that we want but also works because we we do have an, a certain type of audience in Fortnite. Like I think that'll change as we get more features and get more benefits like that different things that people can do. But for now, like it's very heavy on PvP, like, yeah, it's got to be combat adjacent. And that's what I was kind of proud on Farm Tycoon. So we had a lot of that. You had people fighting each other in their farms and, and like launching around the map and shooting each other. And I think that's important. Like you have to make sure that you're you're doing something that kind of blends it, Yeah. Speaker 1 Also, and I know a lot of people play in this game and not and a lot of people it's it's controversial, but you once you like a tycoons generally don't have weapons. But if you put PvP in your game, you that now opens you up for other tabs as well. You know what I mean? Because like I remember, I can't remember what this happened. So we had a zombie. It's kind of like a zombie rogue like game. And we what what happened was we had it like a PV you could start, you could eliminate your team. It was a Pve game, but a bug happened and we could start eliminating each other and it like changed in the algorithm like it flagged it as like a not a PVAPVP and it like put us in a different. It was, it was very strange at the time, but it kind of opened my eyes like they are watching these things. Speaker 2 I mean that that happens a lot. I mean, obviously with when we did, when I made Quick's Tycoon with Trick Tiger, that was a little different. We made that one a little more PvP focused. But even when Farm Tycoon was in picks, it got into the combat discover over a bit, which is just a chill tycoon and it's in combat. Speaker 1 But then in combat can't compete with the tycoon's average play time. Speaker 2 No. Speaker 1 So anyway, we're talking about gaming a system now that we already I know we it does drive a lot of people nuts and I it drives me nuts too when I go to the row. Speaker 2 True, right? Like if it's got common no. Speaker 1 No, for your game that works. I think that works for sure. But you know, look like the racing genre is it's all open world art, you know, GTA. Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 Kind of coffee games and that's in the race. Those are the top racing games and and, and you can't compete with that style of tycoonish open world RPG racing then with an actual racing game, right. So it's, it's, it's, it's tough. Anyway, No, I'm I'm glad we thought I had that was a great, great talk on that. And I hope some people can take some things from that. Unpacking In-App Purchase Success and Player Investment I want to get talking about IP again. You tweeted that you had some success with in app purchasing during pics. Like what was the context around that? What does success actually mean in practice? Like what did you learn about player spending when you got the extra exposure? Speaker 2 Yeah. So the cool thing is like with that, we can also see like reporting on like if players think it's a good purchase or not, right? Like they can, if you're a player and you're playing Fortnite and you feel like the map kind of ripped you off because you spent 500 V bucks or something, you can report that. And like that shows up in our analytics. The surprising thing is, is like all the stuff that we put in had less than a 1% report rate. The only stuff that had close to a 1% report rate was stuff that we added. OK, so we did some trolling, which is in the farming game where there's no combat. It actually I think it worked out well. Like we had it where you could jail somebody for 100 V bucks and you'd throw them in a jail and then they have to pick axe a rock for 40 times before they get back out. And so even if you leave the game and come back, you still have to pick axe that rock. And so it's kind of a fun thing to like troll people. And we had like 4000 people buy that just while we were in pics, which that was our second most purchased item is kind of crazy. I didn't expect that at all. Speaker 1 No, but that's fun. That creates fun moments and also for social media side of things, thinking like that, that could be a really good social media post as well of like, oh, I can't, you know, caging somebody and you know, whatever emotions. Speaker 2 Was trick tigers idea and he even had the idea we added him as well or revenge mechanic and that one didn't do it as well. But like essentially if somebody jailed you, you could jail your friend back and spend 100 V bucks and then it would double the amount of times they needed to hit the pickaxe. So like they could potentially have to be stuck in a jail cell for like 10 minutes if you need to get it back and forth enough. Speaker 1 No, that's very cool. And and like I said, there's not much dad or anyone much talking about this right now. If anyone's like on the fence right now about putting in app purchases in their game, what would you say to them? Speaker 2 I would say, like, try it. Like, it can't hurt, right? Like, people are going to spend money on what they want to spend money on. Is this tale as old as time, right? Like, yeah, if I want to waste some money in a video or, you know, I shouldn't say waste because that's not fair. If I want to spend my money on something, like, you're going to do it, right. Yeah, like mobile games have that, every game has that. So I think the biggest thing is just make something that helps remove some friction from your game. Like that's part of the fun of gaming, right, Is the friction and the challenge of like, oh, I wanna complete this, I wanna do this thing. So like one of the big our biggest in app purchase in the game was to get like 10,000 start out your game and boost it and just little things like that. Like I think they're huge, right, Like just things that can like give somebody a leg up or like I think it also is AI think a hidden benefit of in app purchases that we're going to see as we get bigger and better maps is that's also investment, right? Like the players spent a ton of E bucks in your map, like they're going to want to keep coming back because they've got that investment. They've got more than just like the time invested into it, right, They've got money invested into it. So trying to make things that, you know, when we talk about it, it seems like it's another retention mechanic is how can you get people more invested in your games? That's the perfect way to say it. And I saw and I'm blanking. I. Speaker 1 I did see a stat, I think it was on mobile. It was robot. I, I don't know, but basically a player that spent money in your game, like their chances of coming back or staying and put it playing longer in your game were exponential. Yeah, that's huge and I don't think a lot. Speaker 2 Of people are thinking as about it. Speaker 1 Like that. So I think that that is very smart and and I think the only thing I would add to what you said, which is perfect is if if you are on the fence, you know, there's ways to do this, like maybe whatever is the grinding mechanic and you speed that up. Can they get it for free? If they grind it right it it can they obtain this without having to spend money? You know, then I think that's fair game as well, you know, but think things like that where it feels, I don't want to say scummy, but like, it doesn't feel. It's not though. It's not predatory, you know? Yeah, you're not. Speaker 2 Predatory. It's not like, you know, you see the trolling videos. I think that's how laser beam did one where it's like you had to pay V bucks to walk. Yeah. Yeah. With pens. Yeah. Yeah, Shank did a troll. Speaker 1 Post about that on Twitter. Speaker 2 You know, that's a joke. But in reality, like if you just do little things, no one's those people never have seen, nobody's gonna do that, right? But like you do some little things that make it easier. Like that's great. People love that. Like they're going to spend it. So like, if you're really passionate about it and you love this platform and you want to be on it, why would you not introduce something like, you know, put something in your map that can make you more money so you can keep doing this? Like, yes, Because I think that the other side of it that we forget is that like we were talking about earlier, you know, you're creating fun for somebody and it's really important for them. We have some fans that come and play every tycoon we make, every game we make and they keep, you know, we have the followers now and it's huge. Yes, I think that we miss. Speaker 1 Out on that fact. Speaker 2 That like, even if the game is not important to us anymore, like it was important to somebody. And so, like, if they want to spend money in it, let them. They want to support us. Like, yeah, it's it's only scummy if you make it scummy. Like it doesn't have to be like you said, it just removes friction and makes the game more fun for somebody. Yeah, yeah, someone like me that doesn't have a lot of time. Speaker 1 Like, speed things up, all right, I. Speaker 2 Want to zoom? Crafting Brand-Safe and Fair Monetization for Players Out a little bit like what do you think smart brand safe monetization looks like in Fortnite right now? What feels fair to players and what do you think will backfire even if it makes money short term? This is a hard one. Yeah, I think what works well what's like. Speaker 2 Safe for your brand. I think pricing things lower, 30 bucks is the big thing. I don't think you have. I don't think we're at the point where you can sell like A and you saw backlash acted on this with the Steeler brain rot. You saw like 5000 V bucks for yeah. I think that might work long, short term for some of the bigger maps, but I think long term that's not gonna work like I don't think that's sustainable. I think you have to make sure whatever your pricing offers value. Yeah, like in like in relation to that, right. Like you wanted to actually like save somebody. Like like you said, like I'm a dad too. So like I got at at certain time of the day, I have to quit working. And so like, yeah, I can't play games after that time. Like, so if you make things that make it easier for the person playing your game, I think that's what's going to be the the most successful brand safe thing is like something that like especially like for me and tycoons, you know, like that's a lot of older audience than like your combat maps. Focusing on somebody that makes their time a little bit easier and they can have more fun in the game because it makes it quicker is more important. Because I don't think we're to the point to where like you can sell a whole expansion in your game yet, right. Yeah. I think just little things that make it more fun or the safe route right now. I think that I think for that like custom weapons and stuff work. I think that I bet those will get cheaper as time goes on because people, you know, everybody can do that. Everybody can add custom weapons and stuff. Yeah, well, especially when they actually give it to us natively. Speaker 1 In game engine, yeah. Where's that at? Ashley? See the road map? I think that's. Speaker 2 In Q3, yeah, it's been pushed like a year I think at this point. Speaker 1 But we I know on real fest they kind of even announced, did a little announcement around and got pushed again. But yeah, I it'll be nice to have and we're getting to the end. We have a few. Well, like one more last question before we we get to that. Building Sustainable UEFN Careers and Future Projects You know, I always ask this like I want to give you a chance to plug your stuff. So, like, what are you building right now and where should people follow you? Yeah. So I think we can talk about this we're making. Speaker 2 Pizza Shop 2 right now, we're working on that. Nice. That's going to be our next big tycoon. I think that it'll it has a lot of replayability. It's pretty exciting. My socials are the same everywhere. If I did sloth on, you know, X on Discord, it's all the same handle. So if you see it on one thing, it's everywhere else. Yeah, feel free to reach out. I'm like, I love connecting with people. I'm always open to do more work. I love collaborating but done brand projects so I'm happy to help people with level design and environment stuff. 1st work. Yeah, it's really fun to collaborate with other creators. Amazing. All his links will be in the description of course go. Speaker 1 Follow him and yeah, if you're if you need a good developer that's been in this space that can pull CCUS and knows this place in and out, definitely reach out to Sloth. He's helped me personally sometimes inside of UFN as well as he is the real deal. So lastly, let's look ahead. OK, looking towards 2026, what do you think will matter most for creators who actually want to last, not just get a hit, but build something like sustainable? That's a tough one I think, actually. Speaker 2 Here's my prediction. I could be totally wrong here, but I think not making your game copied off of something from Roblox is going to be a big thing. That's kind of meta right now is a lot of people create something that's already popular out there and then hope they can get the license before they get taken down. Yeah. And I think that will probably be, to some degree of truth, always a thing. But like we were talking earlier, like this is the, this is a higher quality of UGC I think in the long term. So I think that if you can do, if you can focus on making yourself different and stand out, that's going to be way more important than just trying to copy everybody else and do something the same like you have. We all, we all know those creators that like do things a little bit differently and they've really managed to stick out because of that. So I think I think the biggest. Speaker 1 Thing that people can focus on. Speaker 2 Is maybe don't look at the big thing, find something that's maybe a little bit underserved or a little bit not as popular. Like when I started Tycoons, there weren't a lot of tycoons. And I think that's what helped me be successful is because I found something that was a little bit less competitive. It's more competitive now, of course, but you know, maybe maybe there's something that an audience is not being served. So I think the biggest thing that that you can focus on is how can you make yourself different? Yeah, That that that's, that's a. Speaker 1 Great answer And, and, and honestly too, like if you're trying to make those quick hit maps, you're competing with thousands of other creators. A lot of these creators have have done it. They've already basically set up a pipeline that already has most of these things so they can crank these things out fast. And they're they're also publishing mult, which that's another topic we don't need to get into, but you know that that's a thing that we got to get fixed with the multiple publishing of the same, same maps. But but again, it's a even tougher Rd. I believe to hit. And then if you are trying to go that licensing route where you're just trying to be first out there and get the CCU's and then hopefully you don't get sued and they actually want to work with you, you know that that could go South. Again, a lot of risk. Yeah, a lot of risk. So again, it's definitely good things to think about. And and I think creators should have in the back of their mind when they're thinking about building things. And again, doesn't mean not, don't, don't, don't, don't avoid maybe some of the popular masks, but how can you make it your own or make it more fun, less friction, or how can you combine multiple game modes into something crazy? You know what I mean? Like, I'm always consistently thinking about the top games that are popular and why I like brain rot. Whatever you want to say about it, go in there and you're going to understand all of the game loops in there and how, how, how addicting they are and how, how just just just like the how, how sticky it is. And you don't even realize it until you've been in there. And now you're like, Oh my gosh, a lot of people don't notice that, you know, you like, you get caught up and. Speaker 2 Like hating on something because you don't like it. But if you actually like, look at it, I can see how they're so popular. You know, like, yeah, when you slap somebody and steal right now, it's kind of satisfying. And you can like, Oh yeah, you know, it's also it's kind of fun because it's kind of like a tycoon, but at the same time, you can go in and steal some somebody's thing and you're immediately like 10 times ahead of where you would have been if you just played with playtime. Like, so I think there's something to always, you're right there. There's always something to take away, even if it's not something that you're necessarily a fan of. There's always something to learn from every game that's in Discover, even if you don't, you know, find that one fun. Yeah. Yeah, I would. My kids do. Speaker 1 Love the game. Obviously the younger kids are, it's all over schools and all the sayings and stuff, so they love to play it. So I'll watch them play also because I want to watch just because I'm trying to learn too about these games And, and it's crazy the like this guy stole my brain rot. I'm going to do everything I can to steal his stuff. I'm going to try to hit him. And then I don't have this super powerful slapper. I don't have these certain freezes. I don't have these certain dudes. Oh, I need to rebirth to get it. I mean, it's I want these, these my kids. I want this brain rot. You know what I mean? All the all these things and it's just, you know, how do you turn that into into something different? And I'll just say it like my brain, I've been thinking there's a lot. There's one side of the coin where there is some of the hate on the brain rot. But like how do you use that to your advantage? And and one thing I thought of and I don't I haven't seen it yet. Doesn't mean it's not out there. Maybe you've seen it like havoc. What if there was a havoc hotel type rogue life? You're cleaning out brain rots. Speaker 2 And saving the world from brain. Speaker 1 Rots and maybe there's boss fight brain rots, you know what I mean? Like, think about that game that and maybe it doesn't do anything. But again, those are two popular games that you could to infuse and maybe make something that pops, I don't know, whatever. Yeah. And you get in that game right away like. Speaker 2 And regardless of knowing the mode or not, you immediately realize what you're supposed to do. And like, that is one thing that I've had to get better at in my Tycoons is onboarding. Like it should just feel naturally instinctive of what the player needs to do. And like, that's something we can learn to take away for our own games is like focusing on how can we make that easier? And that onboarding, like the first couple minutes are so critical to like your CCU, your average play time, like all of that, if you have it, it's confusing, it's not going to happen. But like, that's why I think Steal a Brain Rot does so well, because the second you're in that, you know what you're supposed to do. Yeah. You see everything? No. Speaker 1 For sure it's it's very. Speaker 2 Quick onboarding it's. Speaker 1 It's it's very easy, even if you don't have money, you can steal and then you got that cage, right? You don't want people to steal your stuff. So every there's that timer going on. It's console have to go back and make sure it's locked. And I'm trying to, it's, it's a master class, I think in, in retention and engagement. And I think whatever you feel about it, you should be studying it and try to understand if you use any of those that you can put into your game. And that's, that's, that's all, That's what they do on Roblox as well. They, they're doing that, that exact same thing. And hopefully you can make the next big hit. Look, this was a fun talk, man. I mean, you could talk forever about this stuff. We could talk shop. And like I said, man, I, I always enjoy our conversations and you're always open to share, share things and help out other creators and really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Likewise. So you're one of the first. Speaker 2 People that like I got to meet an ecosystem being so friendly is huge. Like it's, it is a small world. So you want to, you know, be good to everybody and spread good vibes and rising tide lifts all boats, right? Exactly, exactly. And that's just it, I. Speaker 1 I, I never understood that that side of things. I'm always, you know, there's, I'm, I'm not here just because of me, you know, sure it's my hard work. I did put in and I, I did a lot of things to get here, but it's the people, it's the people I've met that I've learned things from and vice versa. And we share and it comes back. It comes back somehow, whatever, whatever it is, it really does. It really does. So man, I hope, I hope to see you out in real fast this year. You know what it means. That'd be awesome. And if you guys do see go say hi, definitely go say hi to him. Absolutely. Thank you. All right, brother, that's an. Speaker 2 Episode man. Well, maybe have to. Speaker 1 Have you come on again sometime? Yeah. Thank you. I love it. Take care. Speaker 2 Later. Huge thank you to Slide it Sloth. Speaker 1 For coming on and being so open about what is actually working in UEFN right now, from thumbnails and click through rate to first launch strategies, testing disciplines, retention loops, and monetization, this episode is packed with practical lessons you can apply immediately. Make sure you are following Slided Sloth and check out the maps he is shipping. And if you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor. All the podcasts subscribe on YouTube. Hit that like button and if you're listening on audio, leave a positive review on your favorite podcast app. It generally helps out more than you think. See you in a fortnight, which is in two weeks. And Remember, Remember, don't hate create.