Epic has over 90 staff on Fortnite and a new game in the works

Fortnite has been almost entirely silent since its late 2011 reveal, but Epic Games has confirmed it has a substantial team working on the project - as well as a mysterious, unannounced new game.

The news comes from Epic's GDC 2014 presentation, and follows confirmation that Fortnite has "evolved" but is making "tremendous progress".

According to Polygon's account of the event, Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said a team of more than 90 staff is working on Fortnite, so it's definitely not on the backburner.

"We're building Fortnite, which is a bigger and way cooler game than we imagined. It started out as an internal game jam project at Epic and has grown over time. We have a combination of a great building game, an action-combat game and with some [light] elements of an MMO. We'll be saying more about that in the coming months," Sweeney promised.

Fortnite will be developed continuously after release, in response to fan feedback. This is an increasingly common model, but a first for Epic.

"We're looking at the future of gaming from kind of a Valve or Riot point of view, making your games really accessible, being fair to customers and giving them a great value with a game that can be played for hundreds or thousands of hours," Sweeney said.

"That's what we're doing with Fortnite and what we're looking at for everything we do at Epic, from the games side to the engine side."

Fortnite's cartoony aesthetic isn't the graphical pizazz Epic is known for, but the company has something more traditional in the works, too.

"We're also in the early development stages of a game that will continue the Epic tradition of pushing high-end, leading-edge graphics," Sweeney said.

"We're working very close with Nvidia on new features and capabilities to bring things to the next level. We won't be announcing that [game] for a long time but we're continuing to be at the forefront [of graphics technology]."