First LEGO Fortnite minifigure designs led to hundreds of in-game versions

The LEGO Fortnite team has revealed how their initial minifigure designs ultimately led to Epic Games creating over 1,500 digital characters. 

LEGO Fortnite fans don’t have long to wait now to get their hands on the first wave of official sets, which are all due to drop on October 1. The models include 77070 Durrr Burger, 77071 Supply Llama, 77072 Peely Bone and 77073 Battle Bus, four builds inspired by the massively popular Epic Games title.

When it came to collaboration between the two companies, assets were created in tandem and shared between both parties to ensure plenty of synergy between the digital LEGO Fortnite versions and physical sets. In fact, that was just one of the topics discussed with Brick Fanatics during a recent roundtable interview with the LEGO Fortnite design team.

“We spent a lot of time on concepting the models and that took a while” explained senior designer John Cuppage. “But early on, we knew we needed to get started to finish the element designs and get those locked away. In this instance, we had to do it even earlier, because we wanted to create a shortlist of characters to choose from.”

“We wanted more control over the how they looked, element-wise and graphics wise," said John. "So we had our element design team and graphic design team working on, at the time, what would become game assets, but knowing that we wanted to probably make those as physical minifigures.”

As well as working closely with their IP partner to establish the look of the minifigures that would be included with 77073 Battle Bus, the LEGO Fortnite team’s early designs also acted as a springboard for Epic Games to create even more in-game skins.

“We had a special first time ever collaboration process where we kind of pre-loaded them," John elaborated, "almost like a design for manufacture level, but they were going off as game assets. Then we picked them up later on to 100% make sure we could actually mould them.

We're also limited by resources, so we took about 20 characters as a shortlist and our designers sketched up elements for those. We then prioritised another 10 to 15 of those and Epic Games used them to design the rest of the remaining 1,500 characters [in LEGO Fortnite]!”

The full line-up of LEGO Fortnite sets will be arriving online and in-stores next month, when 77070 Durrr Burger, 77071 Supply Llama, 77072 Peely Bone and 77073 Battle Bus all launch on October 1.

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