StaffsVerse: Building a Metaverse Campus Utilising the Unreal Editor for Fortnite

The StaffsVerse project develops a virtual replica of Staffordshire University's campus within the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), with the aim of easing student transition, supporting remote campus tours, and reducing barriers to access. The work is motivated by recurring difficulties students face when entering higher education, including navigating large campuses and the cost-of-living pressures that limit attendance at open days. It situates itself within earlier virtual campus efforts, such as the "Transitional Games" Campus Quest and SPARX, and within the wider potential of metaverse platforms for university settings.

The authors describe a deliberate shift from a self-hosted, peer-to-peer-averse metaverse architecture, which proved costly to build and maintain, to Fortnite's UEFN. The platform was selected for its free-to-play distribution across many devices, built-in networking supporting up to 100 concurrent players, and shorter development cycles. Adopting UEFN removed the need to build networking, distribution, user management, and source control from scratch. An early Mars-themed, 1:1 scale pilot was used to test scalability and navigation before the campus model was developed.

Practical implementation constraints shaped the design. A 400MB download limit led the team to prioritise meshes over high-resolution textures and to reuse Fortnite's existing materials, with the finished island using roughly a quarter of available resources. The conclusions present UEFN as a fast-track development environment whose third-person mechanics suit location exploration, and they recommend reusing existing textures and standard mesh dimensions to keep island size low. The authors position the metaverse campus as a cost-effective and accessible tool for student onboarding and campus familiarisation, with the remainder of the paper consisting largely of references on virtual learning environments, metaverse education frameworks, and game server technology.