QINGYUAN FAN
(Adam Fan)
Libertalia: a pirate's paradise
Game Design
System & UI/UX
In Libertalia, you assume the role of a pirate admiral in the Golden Age of Piracy. Build up your pirate paradise for your crew. Explore the open seas to find new territories to plunder, participate in open-sea battles, and hunt sea monsters. Raid settlements with your crew in land combat simulations. By managing your crew’s strengths and resources in these three unique phases, you’ll develop your outpost from shantytown to fortress, become a formidable force on the seas, and lead professional brigands. That is, if your crew can best other pirates, colonialists, skeleton crews, and legendary sea monsters.
Libertalia's core gameloop consists of three phases: outpost, exploration, and plundering. As the system designer, this poses a big challenge for me. The three phases are proposed since the initial pitch though they are quite different in gameplay and pacing. My design goal is to get players onboard the three phases smoothly while also keeping the whole experience consistent. Even though I have not much experience in UX previously, my role forces me to think critically and iterate constantly. Our group adopts an agile process, which means we holds playtest at the end of every sprint, every two weeks. We gather feedback from our fellow students and professors to identify the problems that we attempt to mitigate in the next sprint. For the majority of the last six month, we have tried to polish the user experience with emphasis on onboarding the complicated mechanics to players. During GDC, we held a playtest to expand our playtester group, and the result is surprisingly good. Even for those who don't play strategy games very often, they can get onboarded with our current mechanics well and comprehend their goal and tools for that goal. The game was recognized in Game Feel category at the EDGE RIT 2024.