Designing a more friendly Fortnite with food, puns, and no in-app purchases

Apple Arcade’s latest hit started out as a joke. The developers at Singapore-based Mighty Bear Games had already pitched an idea to Apple for its new subscription service, but two days before CEO Simon Davis was set to fly to California to iron out the details, someone on the team came up with a pun so powerful it derailed everything. That pun was “butter royale,” and it got the studio thinking about ways to make the ever-popular battle royale genre more approachable. It’s a space dominated by behemoths like Fortnite, PUBG, and Apex Legends, but Davis thought there was enough room to try something different. “We wanted to give an alternative that was much more accessible and family-friendly and non-threatening,” he explains.

Butter...

Continue reading…