Level Design & Game Design

Patrick of the Caribbean

Screenshots

Patrick of the Caribbean is a turn-based strategy game where you play as Patrick the pirate. Patrick, a once high-ranking Captain, has been stripped of everything he owned. Being the drunken mess that he now is, he must find a way to get his Captain rank back, without getting all too sober.

When balancing the gear we wanted the player being able to create their own build, that fit their playstyle. Enemies and gear had a lot of different stats and special modifiers like life steal, crit, thorns, health regeneration, damage over time,  backstab, ammunition, HP and action points. All these things added a depth to the game that allowed us Level designers making items that had a special uniqueness to them.

Around 5 weeks into the project, I still felt there were some elements missing in the game. I started a discussion with everyone in the group and pitched an idea that we should have bosses in the game. Since we were short on time, I knew the programmers wouldn't have time to do something extraordinary. I sat down with my Level Design partner and talked, we came up with 3 boss fights that were added to the game. All the bosses got some extra feature to them and it was all doable with the time we had.

(Boss #1 starts fleeing after damaged enough)

(items and gear)

(Boss #3 summons enemies at a certain % of hp)

In this project, we were two Level designers. The level editor we used were Tiled and our main job was to produce 20 levels. The workflow between us was quickly established. One person did the top down and the other did the block out, enemy, prop and decal placement. After that, the person who created the top down did the second iteration of everything on the level. This workflow learned us both to work closely with another Level designer and lead to an equal quality on the levels.

(Final iteration step)

I pushed the concept of having color coded enemies to add extra variation to the gameplay, this meant we had all the original enemies plus modified version of them. For example, Yellow meant that the enemy had health regeneration, Green meant that they had more HP than normal. All this helped create a more interesting gameplay without putting too much stress on our Artists. In a turn-based strategy, it's important explaining when the player receives damage during their own turn. Some of our enemies in the game had "Thorns damage", so we added an element in the tutorial explaining this to the player.

My contributions:

Specification:

Tools:

T

XML

Adobe Photoshop

Autodesk Maya

Notepad ++

In-house tools

L

Game design

Level dressing

Gameplay balancing

Quality assurance

Boss mechanic design

Item balancing

S

School project: 8 weeks(half time)

Level editor: Tiled

Engine: In-house

Team size: 10

2 Level Designers

3 Artists

5 Programmers