Battle Pirates

Designer - Kixeye

November 2017 - September 2018

As a designer, Battle Pirates has been a challenging and rewarding experience for me. It has offered me both the opportunity to flex my level design background and to also sink my teeth into proper systems design. But the most unique opportunity arose from the fact that Battle Pirates has been around for over 7 years and a rabid fanbase who expect nothing but perfection in the game they've invested so much of their time and hard earned money. 

Duties

• Mission design – Event missions, bi-weekly mission content, and tuning (including live tuning)

• Content design – Monthly events, tuning ship hull designs, weapons, and special equipment

• Assist on creating best practices in level design, processes, and leveraging my experience in supporting design goals

Every 2 weeks, I delivered brand new levels for various events. These levels were created based on the damage type and ship/hull classes dictated by one of 4 seasons. Each season presents a different gameplay style, for example Skirmish (player vs PvE ships), Garrison (player vs some PvE stationary ships and mostly PvE turrets, Assault (player vs some PvE turrets and mostly PvE ships, and Siege (player vs all PvE turrets).

To meet the needs of the player's attacking ships for each season, weapons, armor, and specials were designed for each season and escalated their damage and effectiveness in the weeks and months during the season. Part of my job was to design and tune new weapons, armor, and specials to accompany the season's new hulls as well as older hulls (to help keep them relevant). This was my first real foray into systems design and tuning and it was thrilling to see it come together along with my level designs. 

The most unique experience I had with Battle Pirates has to be with its 7 year old player base. My expectations for players were blown out of the water when I joined the Battle Pirates team. This population of players started playing during the boon of the Facebook gaming rush and these players rarely played any other games and so what my instincts may have dictated (for example high risk/damage for high reward) were almost exactly the polar opposite. I just needed to re-calibrate my expectations and build towards the Battle Pirates' player to optimize the success of a release.