The adventure begins with you and your pals embarking on a boat trip to an island paradise filled with adorable cats and endless fun.

Players make a home at one of four charming locations: the picnic lodge adorned with a picnic table and BBQ, the pumpkin farm boasting an abundance of fresh vegetables, the woodland lodge with a scenic woodland path and ocean vista, or the small castaway island overlooking the beach.

The core game focuses on nurturing your bond with your feline companion, understanding its preferences, and discovering activities to enjoy together.

Core activities include keeping your cat content through petting and feeding. Healthy food and delicious treats can be found across the island and harvested from various plants and trees scattered throughout.

The island serves as a vibrant playground for players and their feline friends, offering an array of activities such as fishing in the harbour, organising a beach party, baking delicious treats at the bakery, collecting the day’s catch from the pier, indulging in a sauna at the hilltop treehouse, and unwinding in the botanical gardens.

Additionally, scattered around the island are mini-LEGO-builds that can be constructed to unveil enjoyable activities with your cat. These include the Cat Tower for exercise, the Boombox for impromptu feline dance moves, a Salon for grooming and dress-up, and the Cat Shower for cleanliness.

The Art Direction for this Island blends real-life LEGO^® sets with Fortnite’s premade assets, harmonizing palettes for a cosy, nature-inspired ambience. We chose autumn as our backdrop, The warm, rich colours of red, orange, and golden yellow create a visually inviting and comforting atmosphere. 

Within the island, you’ll find carefully placed wooden lodges, a charming tree-house, inviting jacuzzis, cascading waterfalls, and more—all meticulously designed to craft a welcoming setting where you can explore and unwind, with the delightful company of your feline friend.

Creating LEGO^® Cat Island Adventure, an experience unlike anything on the platform, demanded ingenuity and lateral thinking to bring to fruition.

Developing a responsive, dynamic, and sometimes stubborn Cat demanded a tailored solution to drive its behaviour. This approach enabled numerous opportunities for emergent and spontaneous interactions within the game. 

A core part of bringing our adorable Cats to life was allowing them to go anywhere, navigate the terrain and LEGO sets, follow the player and distractions, and maintain the autonomy cats are renowned for. To achieve this, we developed an A* pathfinding system with multiplayer support, later enhanced by integration with the Control rig and Nav mesh for improved navigation precision.

Lastly, while Fortnite thrives on traversal and high-speed exploration, LEGO^® Cat Island Adventure needed to take a different approach, focusing on a more leisurely pace of gameplay. To achieve this, entirely new interactions were crafted, and custom controls were implemented. This reshaped the pace of a Fortnite map to suit the game’s vision.

LEGO^® Cat Island Adventure represents a unique play proposition, designed to cater to and grow a new audience within the UEFN Ecosystem. 

To support healthy play and provide a safe place for younger audiences online, LEGO & Epic have made fundamental changes to the Fortnite platform. Voice chat, push notification and purchasing are disabled for anyone under the age of 13, islands now have an age rating so parents can determine which islands are suitable for their children and cabined accounts have been introduced, where parental consent is required to access certain features.

As designers, our primary objective was to foster healthy play behaviours and avoid grindy or harmful game loops. We considered session length, the removal of combat elements, and the exclusion of certain engagement features—such as appointment and gated progression mechanics—commonly found in mobile games.

This commitment to promoting healthy play was realised in partnership with LEGO’s Responsible Gaming teams and validated through our Play Pioneers program.

LEGO^® Cat Island Adventure is available for everyone to play:

Play the Game