How I spent 100 hours recreating my high-school in Fortnite

We’ve all been there — imagining having a map we personally know. Now, the people of New York, Seattle, and other major American cities might have had that itch scratched through multiple fantastic games, but coming from an Indian city, there’s still a very long time before that happens.

That doesn’t mean I hadn’t thought of it. After all, my closest friends are all from school. Over the years, we’ve gone through multiple games together. As such, the idea of creating a map of our high school was always in the back of my head, and the execution of said dream actually started way back in 2017, when I first graduated.

The first steps — Building the school in CS:GO

The Hammer World Editor wasn’t the best engine to begin with

After school ended, none of us had anything to do except wait to hear from the colleges we applied to. During this time, we finally started playing Fortnite. However, the main game we played day in and day out, was still Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

As such, the first attempt I made to recreate my high school in a game was in CS:GO. I booted up the Hammer World Editor, and religiously followed 3kliksphilip’s tutorial videos to get started.

As someone who had never touched or even thought about map creation or engines, it was tough to work with. Cutting out shapes to make each and every single wall, floor, and flight of stairs was horrible, and the project itself started out as low-effort.

My first attempt was to create my own house, and even that took a week and looked terrible. Still, I moved to the school, and I got done building the first section of the ground floor. Then, I learned that I had to optimize the map according to blind spots to make sure it remained playable, and I gave up. Suddenly, the idea of bomb sites A and B being the Principal’s Office and the Cafeteria was no longer exciting enough to keep going.

I had used Fortnite’s Creative mode years ago

It remains one of the very best map editors ever

Right when 2018 ended, Fortnite came out with the Creative mode, letting players create their own islands with their choice of elements. By this time, Fortnite had become the exclusive game we played, and these private islands helped us get better at building and aiming. The truth, however, is that this mode was always the safe haven to retreat to when SBMM really insisted on beating us down on particular days.

For years, these lay dormant and forgotten, until September 2024 came around, and I just felt like reviving my old private island. I updated it with prefabricated bridges, ascenders, buildings, and added vehicles. There was also a wooden structure here I shaped into an expletive, but we won’t talk about that.

It really wasn’t much, but the fun I had with the new tools of the Creative mode stuck around. What followed was the eight-year-old bug in my head. It felt like the Green Goblin mask staring at me, daring me to think about doing the high school project in Creative, waiting for me to give in… and I did.

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The initial build happened in the game’s map editor

Creative mode’s limitations became apparent when I needed granular control

Naturally, I started building in the Creative mode first, since it was the only way I knew how. Two days into it, I realized that I’d been building at ground level, completely forgetting that I also needed to leave space for underground basement levels. Going back to delete everything and restarting like Perfect Cell who just noticed a missing tile in the tournament stage, I began anew.

Almost immediately, I ran into the next problem. When the time came to lay down longer tiles and floors, or extend existing ones, my character’s mere twitches meant that things would always be askew, and it took two minutes on the lowest mouse DPI to make the two floor tiles match. Next, I also realized I needed to go down half-a-floor instead of an entire floor, but Creative mode only allowed changes by the grid — at least in the way I needed.

Realizing I was a little out of my depth, I figured I could either give up, or continue building as per the 1×1 grid blocks, and still get away with some appreciation from the squad because, hey, at least I tried.

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Moving to Unreal Editor for Fortnite

This was the only way to have total control

Settling for neither outcome, I went ahead and installed Unreal Editor for Fortnite, since it promised way more granular control over the map I was making. What I didn’t do this time was look at video tutorials on YouTube to learn about the engine. This time around, it was more about learning as I went and used UEFN, and only searching for a solution to a problem when I ran into it.

This “crossing the bridge when I get to it” approach actually helped — I made a lot of progress within the first couple of weeks, and only spent a handful of hours online, watching videos to figure out how to navigate certain obstacles. The bulk of my search queries were just finding shortcuts to do what I needed.

The ease of creation in UEFN definitely stuck out — functions and features came intuitively to me, the prefabs were all interactable and scalable, and every single building, prop, or structure that Fortnite has ever seen was all there for me to use.

Close enough was not enough, actually

Settling for the next best wall or texture made the school unrecognizable

Now that I was working from inside UEFN, I wanted nothing but complete accuracy. For the first week, I focused on building the ground floor, along with the playground and the laws at the front. This was going to be a challenge, since the ground floor of each wing started at different levels. This is where UEFN truly came in handy, and the move to the engine made the most sense.

While I did settle for finding walls that were the closest match in texture and paint, it soon started reaching unfamiliar territory. With a dozen things being “close enough” with none of them being actually accurate, the overall project became far removed from the real thing in terms of look and feel. The structure was the same, but it just didn’t feel like my high school, nor did it look like it.

So, I started cropping photos that I had lying around, upscaling them in Stable Diffusion, and once I started planting those textures on the walls and corridors, I was back in my school.

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The initial weeks were the toughest

I’m not an architect, after all

I ran into a problem with the architecture itself, wondering what godforsaken contractor the school had hired since nothing made sense — not in my head, and not on my map, either. Out came the graphing paper to make heads or tails of the structure. Moreover, on two separate occasions, I made a call to old friends living in the vicinity to go visit the school and send me pictures of the textures.

Then, there was also the time when I began calling up my friends with real jobs in the middle of the day to ask them which wall or roof tiles felt more accurate, or how many pillars we had in the prayer room. Suffice to say, those messages were met with answers, but not before a bevy of choice curse words for prefacing my questions with “urgent”.

Sooner rather than later, I realized that the dream of building my high school in Fortnite, all from scratch, had completely taken me over. I began seeing it in my sleep, fixing my mistakes or finding better ways to make the next floor or wing all while dreaming, and occasionally waking up in the middle of the night, energized and fueled to make changes and build more. Before I knew it, I’d already reached about 70 hours, and the structure — the concrete and the ground around it — was complete.

The embellishments were important, even if untrue

Photorealism would’ve resulted in a bland high school map

Now came the hard part — I was going to embellish the heck out of the school with the expansive library of plants, vegetation, and props that Fortnite had. However, I was going to be fighting the entire time with the memory bar overhead, which kept reminding me that the “vast playground” I was in was only limited to a single gigabyte.

First things came first — the trees and the laws were in the right place, but they didn’t have to be accurate. I went for beautification over accuracy here, choosing to go with big, vibrant trees of different colors, and the floors and lawns strewn with leaves as if it were peak fall.

One important embellishment I knew I had to make was in the computer lab. I just went ahead and recreated my entire workstation inside the computer lab. Does it do anything? No. Does it still look amazing, cool, and meta? Absolutely.

The memory limitation didn’t allow me to fill each classroom with a board and benches, so I stuck to the ones that mattered. The rooms I gave attention to were the ones that each of us in the squad had spent the most time in. Then came the staff rooms, and the major places of interest — the library, the basketball court, the entire playground, cafeteria, the nurse’s office, and of course, the reception.

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Making the high school playable and interesting

I’ve built it, but how do I ensure every corner is utilized?

Next, I needed to provide reasons for each player to go to certain locations. That part was simple enough —

• Nurse’s office — Heals
• Cafeteria — Smaller heals
• Ice Cream Parlor (yes, we had one) — Magical healing ice cream

There were even boogie bombs to collect in the skating rink where we all rehearsed our half-assed dance performances for extra credit. Oh, and there were stink bombs in every washroom, because why not? Everyone’s personal classrooms got special attention and a unique weapon I know each friend loves.

Next, I revisited the lawns, putting in healing plants in there to ensure that the deathmatches would see changes in location when I was being chased by a friend while I tried to desperately heal myself in the lawn.

The uniform shop on campus became the place for a skin-changing booth. There’s a meal-planning lab there, too. That’s where the best heals are, because nothing beats pizza. Finally, it made perfect sense to include an invisible portal only I knew the location to, in case I needed a quick getaway and the pizza was out of reach.

The block around the school

Now, the whole school was nearly complete, but it wouldn’t have felt complete without the surrounding block. Some part of the memory bar was still empty, so I went ahead and built the street around the school.

This included a grocery store right outside, a dumpster further down the main road, a whole line of school buses and cars parked wrongly, and the car models of every friend who would play the map.

In-game testing required careful planning and consideration

Sprints, vantage points, and accessibility across the map were crucial

Once the structure was complete and the embellishments were done, I was still far from done. More than a few times, I’d realized that a lot of classrooms had windows that I couldn’t climb out of. If I was able to mantle out of the window, it was still tough to get right the first time, which would make evasion a problem.

What followed was a meticulous process of jumping through every single window on the map to make sure I could sprint out of them. If not, back to the Editor I went, resizing and scaling the ledges and windows. This took two days, and the next two days went into making every ledge on the walls within climbing distance of each other, ensuring that there wasn’t a single place on the map you couldn’t reach the roof from.

Lastly, of course, came the roof — very few of us had ever been there, and those who had spoken of it as if it were a thing of legend. Tactically, it was the best place to be. I had to make sure that the ledges on the roof were big enough to provide cover, yes, but also small enough to easily climb or shoot over. So, in order to deter every player from staying up there, I added a life drain of 5 HP for every second they’re on the roof. Sweet and simple.

Putting on the final touches and publishing the map

The last leg of the process was rather bittersweet

I was about done, and boy, did it feel good and terrible at the same time. On the one hand, I was finally reaching the end of a month-long, 100-hour journey, and on the other, I didn’t know what I’d do next. I did run out of memory, though, which meant that I knew when it was time to stop creating.

Still, I made sure that the non-negotiables remained. Every weapon that we’ve all ever collectively liked using over eight years was put on the map. This was the time when I spent the most amount of hours on YouTube, learning how to make randomized loadouts that still followed the pattern I wanted. The AR-Shotgun-SMG loadout must remain — fixed weapon types but random weapons. Traversal items took up the fourth spot, and the final inventory spot is the one I lovingly call “sh*ts and giggles”.

Finally, I put in ziplines and ascenders, and portals all around the map to make sure we got around, and a couple of rain and fog effects that lent more atmosphere to the map. With that, I was done. All that was left was to create a playtest group, add all my friends, and even call up a few I’d lost touch with, and get them back to school grounds to play with.

This was the most rewarding creative project I’ve ever undertaken

With about 120 hours (give or take) spent realizing this age-old dream, I knew nothing but happiness in the end. Of course, that isn’t where I stopped. Every day, I would open up the Unreal Editor once again to “take a look” and fix something, until my friend told me I needed to stop, and it really was perfect the way it was.

Still, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye, which meant that with January around the corner, I went onto the map once again after a week and started adding snow textures to existing structures. I decorated the entire school with Christmas props and snow, adding snowfall to the weather system just so I’d have something to do.

However, the biggest fear I had was about the squad forgetting the map after the novelty wore off. Thankfully, that never happened, and to this day, when the main map becomes too much for us, or when our old friend SBMM comes knocking.

There’s no pressure from 90 other players or a storm chasing us to kill us. Here, in my high school inside Fortnite, it’s me, my friends I’ve grown up playing this game with for nearly the past decade, the scoreboard counting our eliminations, and the occasional loadout that’s just so horrible that you might as well jump off the roof.

Fortnite

Released

September 26, 2017

ESRB

T for Teen – Violence

Developer(s)

Epic Games

Publisher(s)

Epic Games

Engine

Unreal Engine 5

Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

Cross-Platform Play

Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One & Xbox Series X|S

Cross Save

yes