Curse of the Corsair
OVERVIEW
Curse of the Corsair (internally known as Project Drift) is a game that was released by WolverineSoft Studio in April, 2023. It’s a case study of the game Hyper Light Drifter with a pirate theme and it’s currently available for FREE on itch.io and Steam.
Hyper Light Drifter is an action RPG where the player can explore several sections of a giant map in any order they’d like which each culminate in a boss fight. As the player explores, they also discover new weapons and unlock new abilities. Our goal as a studio was to make a scaled-down version of the game.
My roles on the team included both technical design and level design along side five other designers as well as a larger team of over forty total developers across every department.
Technical Designer
As a technical designer on the team, a core part of my role was to interface directly with the programmers to ensure the systems that were created actually worked properly for the design team and helped to clarify and make suggestions on how to improve systems.
So, for example, when a programmer created an encounter system that only included a single trigger which caused the player to be locked into an arena, I worked with them to refine the system so that it worked outside of arena encounters.
Other things I worked with the programmers on included various aspects of optimization. I made recommendations on how to tweak our tilemap system as well as recommending certain programming design patterns for the purpose of optimizing projectiles.
The role was light on scripting on the project because we had a really strong programming and production team who been worked extremely quickly to get functionality into the game.
Beyond regularly interfacing with the programming team on the needs of the design team, my role as a technical designer also included creating and referencing technical documentation in Confluence.
[Tilemap System Technical Documentation]
Level Design
As one of the two level designers on the team, my role was to create half of the map for our game as well as the tutorial.
Tutorial
For the tutorial, my process included breaking down every section of Hyper Light Drifter’s tutorial and implementing similar beats in our game based on the pitch/theme of our project (a pirate game about revenge).
The original pitch included the player finding some sort of artifact which gave them supernatural powers. So, I took the idea and placed our tutorial inside of a cave where the player finds this artifact, all the while designing the level in such a way where the player is forced to use each mechanic and system with a specific gameplay purpose.
One of the things that Hyper Light Drifter does well is that (similar to Metroid) it teaches the player how to do something important by impeding their progress and forcing them to learn the system/mechanic before allowing them to continue through the level. Players notoriously don’t read text, so teaching gameplay through means beyond text is important. I utilized this notion throughout the tutorial so that players were unable to progress until they learned the key mechanics that they’d need to use throughout the game.
Another thing that Hyper Light Drifter does well is that the tutorial isn’t a separate entity from the story. It’s part of the story and it doesn’t beat the player over the head with the fact that they’re in a tutorial area. I also took this approach to our tutorial as well. We had UI prompts that let the player know which button to push and things of that nature, but they’re ultimately moving through a core part of the story that doesn’t feel separate from the rest of the game.
Pirate Stronghold
Part of the discussion when it came to the level structure of our game was to either have 4 small levels, or 2 large levels.
Since our project was scoped to be completed in just 3 short months, it was important to figure out how to capture the spirit of the case study while still cutting as much for scope as possible. This led us to decide on 2 larger areas that were more like the original game, instead of 4 smaller areas which wouldn’t accurately convey the case study as well.
Since our theme was effectively Pirates of the Caribbean, this presented an interesting challenge for overlaying a fairly open world with cavernous dungeon spaces and technology into an era from hundreds of years ago.
Hyper Light Drifter relies heavily on movement in both combat and world navigation, so I wanted to find a way to ensure that movement was a key part of trying to make the level design feel fun and interesting. This led me down the path of thinking about what aspects of something like Treasure Island could be utilized as interesting gameplay. The idea took the form of a booby trapped tropical island that felt like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.
Practically speaking, this meant things like spikes coming up from the floor, giant logs flying out of the wall to crush the player, timed fire traps, and arrows shooting at the player when they stepped on certain tiles. One of the really interesting things that was born out of the idea of traps was the ability to combine traps into combat segments to add extra tension and difficulty to the game. They ended up making both movement and combat far more interesting experiences.
Another line of thinking that was useful was trying to come up with a gameplay theme for sections of the map that I was responsible for. In the design of Super Mario Bros., Nintendo will often riff on a single idea in different ways to make levels. I was also reading a game design book where a chapter on level design mentioned how Disney World was designed to have specific themed areas like Main Street and Tomorrowland. So, with those two ideas in mind, I tried to break my half of the map into various chunks which favored certain styles of gameplay more heavily than others.
My original design had an area that tried to emulate the standard dungeon feel from Hyper Light Drifter. Another area had a very Zelda 1 style design to it with puzzles and keys and things of that nature. The last main area I designed leaned heavily into movement and traps.
After I created my level in Figma, it needed to be cut for scope, so I ended up getting rid of the Zelda 1 style section and making the early part of the level a bit smaller. The overall scope of the game is relatively contained, so studio leadership was concerned about player engagement throughout the experience and wanted to ensure that I came up with something that was continuously engaging and easier to polish & test.
Cutting for scope isn’t always an easy process and it provided an interesting challenge based on the reasoning I was given for the scope cuts. At the end of the process, my leads allowed me to execute a bit larger of a scope as long as we weren’t repeating content and the player was able to remain engaged. I ultimately ended up putting ~70% of my original design into Unity to ultimately playtest and polish.
Postmortem/Closing Thoughts
I spent ~3 months as a designer on Curse of the Corsair and in that time I learned a lot of things that made me a better game designer overall.
A major takeaway I had was learning how to communicate more effectively as a designer. It was an interesting experience working closely with various departments and learning how to ensure that I was speaking fully for everyone involved.
This meant not assuming that other departments knew what I meant when I was describing something without extreme detail. For example, when we discussed having boats in the game, I made the assumption that the art team knew we would need to have docks for the boats to be attached to based on my designs, but when I asked the artists where the assets were as I was placing level tiles, the artist I was working closely with didn’t realize that I wanted docks in the game in addition to the boats. This meant we needed to come up with last minute solution to get another asset done for the game, but it could have been avoided with more thorough communication to begin with.
Overall, working on Curse of the Corsair made me a better game developer. Three months is an incredibly short period of time, but I’m grateful to have been part of the team for this project and to see what we were able to accomplish in that period of time!
If you’re interested in playing my work, you can check out the game on Steam or itch.io!