Blue Chicken: The Online Coop was my entry for Epic Jam Colombia 2025; it’s an action roguelike featuring:
- Procedural level generation: Face a different challenge every run
- 2 players online coop: If one of you dies, it’s death for both.
- Permadeath, no meta-progression: Uno se muere y nada se lleva.
UEFN?
In case you don’t know, UEFN (Unreal Engine for Fortnite) is a set of tools allowing creators to develop content to be played inside Fortnite. It’s actually many things including: a special version of Unreal Engine with its own development lifecycle (throwing you directly into Fortnite’s multiplayer-first model), a complete new programming language (Verse), and access to Fortnite’s ever growing interactive assets collection. You develop within the boundaries of what’s exposed to you of the Fortnite client and server.
If you have enough patience to learn a new language with very specific perks, as well as to deal with proprietary servers development model (you cannot run your game locally, which makes development slow paced), you get access to a top notch game engine and an open marketplace: put your “island” in front of tens of thousands of Fortnite players, they might like it (or not).
The Event
Epic Jam Colombia 2025 was an event organized by Epic in their efforts to get more developers onboard UEFN; it ran from November 26 to December 5, 2025 with friends from local companies IndieLevel Studio and Frecuencia Gamer tasked with the organization, and fellow developers from Teravision Games and Dead Monkey participating with talks and advise.
The jam period itself beyond the talks and workshops was December 2 to 4; that’s just 3 days to do something worthwhile with UEFN which I think is a VERY tight schedule (especially if you are new to the technology!). I’m not new so I could come up with some stuff, but I figure it may be too daunting to newcomers.
The Game, The Coop
After the usual inaction triggered by reality checks on whether participating on a game jam while swamped with work is a healthy idea, I jumped into the jam without a lot of time to spare. I decided to do it on my own since coordinating work would be impossible.
The idea was simple: I would create a _real_ roguelike for Fortnite, more closely bound to the tenets of Traditional Roguelikeness as defined in the commandments of the temple. Been wanting to do this for months.
Given the limitations of UEFN, one of the biggest challenges was implement a kind of procedural level generation; this initial version was achieved by rearranging and attaching together a string of shuffled rooms, each one of a different type; think of it as a deck of cards where you can have battles and powerups, the deck gets shuffled with every run and you have to face the challenge put in front of you. The idea was pulled on my other 2025 gamejam entries, Blue Chicken and Blue Chicken DX. Although that one is grid-based and includes some puzzles. Potential improvements would include shuffling and toggling content inside the rooms themselves, as well we implementing non-linear layouts.
Some other big design choices were to have permadeath with no meta-progression at all: instead the game is about making the players adapt to what is thrown to them on each run; starting completely from scratch and with no material advantages. Of course I couldn’t add a lot of variety to the options yet, but it may work if you put enough love into it with interesting challenges and rewards.
As far as I know, it’s a big departure from the existing “roguelike” category (ugh) in the Fornite UGC world. As such, maybe it would be hard to connect with their player base, but hardcore players I think may enjoy the challenge and the invitation for pure mastery instead of infinite grinding.
Of course, this cannot be a complete Traditional Roguelike because it’s Fortnite after all š so deep tactics are replaced with action gameplay. I decided to focus on melee weapons because I think they fit the closed nature of the dungeon better. It would also be a loss to remain a single player experience here, so I made it two players complete coop (unlike many other Islands out there too), work or die together.
The Results, and the future
I didn’t win in any of the categories of the jam, but what was achieved was a great victory to me personally; it’s just a prototype I managed to put together during a very busy work week, but I see a lot of potential on it.
It’s not published yet but maybe I will find some time during 2026 to push it forward to the public, maybe? For now, here’s a gameplay video with friend jucarave.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 