The Buccaneer Brawl

Group Project

The Buccaneer Brawl was developed for a module called “Rapid Games Design”. The result was a highly polished game featuring pirates wracking havoc in a seaside bar, including two playable levels and a cinematic.

The project brief was to develop a vertical slice for a game that was turn-based and had “3 versus 3” gameplay in it over a span of 8 weeks. We early on established different roles across the team, and I was assigned to take care of level design, environmental design, UI backdrops, lighting, and the narrative. I later on also took on the job of making a cinematic between the two levels to more clearly convey the narrative taking place in the game. Each of these areas I worked on have their own sections below, explaining my design process and how they fit into the overarching design of the game.

Narrative

As a group we discussed what kind of turn-based combat system we wanted to make. After talking about it, we decided to go for something that we could do highly polished, even if it was mechanically on the less experimental side. We would make the combat system in 3D, with a side-view, and have the characters be stationary.

I wanted to get the narrative established early on, so that it could serve as a point of inspiration and coherence for the rest of the team. We all agreed that having things take place in a bar would make designing the game interesting, so we started there.

I began by brainstorming potential themes, storylines, characters, and locations. I discussed with my peers throughout the process and merged some of their concepts into the narrative as I fleshed it out. I considered motives and uniqueness when coming up with rough concepts of archetypes or important personalities in the narrative, and eventually the game ended up being about a penniless pirate that does a dine-and-dash at the local seaside bar.

Having established core pieces to the narrative, I moved onto establishing the game’s mood and colour palette. We had yet to decide on a visual direction and mood for the game, so I developed a “colour map” that we could sit down and discuss around as a group. We moved around the map, discussing which areas felt right with the current direction of the game’s overarching design and settled on a couple pictures as core inspiration. This helped me sharpen the visual vision of the environments that I would be doing as well.

To convey the narrative, I was mainly considering how I could show the progress of the storyline through the environments featured in the levels. As the development continued, and the levels were starting to come together, we realised that there was a lack of explanation as for the transition between the areas. To convey the narrative a bit better, I made a cinematic that would play once the player had finished the first level and take them to the new location in the second level.