potc: aotd
swashbucklin' action!
overview
Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned was set to be an Action-Adventure-RPG. A game based around the player choosing to be a swashbuckling Legendary captain, or a supernatural Dreaded pirate. It was also set 15 years before the first film, to disassociate with the films and to give the game creative freedom.
My position on the team was a quest designer. I designed, implemented and maintained Act 2.1 (a large portion of the critical path), one third of the First Mates quests, and over 10 other side quests. Act 2.1 and my first mate quests were regarded as the goal in quality level for quests across the game.
Throughout the team I was renowned for my creative problem solving skills and mastery of the tools. Such mastery allowed me to prototype NPC vs. NPC combat, which was thought to be a 30 day plus engineering, task in about an afternoon.
I also designed and helped implement some environmental interaction mechanics to add a meta-layer of gameplay to some points in combat.
To give you a day to day idea of what I did, some of my responsibilites as a quest designer were:
- Set up quest data (journal entries, markers, rewards, availability, etc.) and steps in the quest manager
- Set up gameplay (spawning NPCs, triggers, behaviours, conversations, etc.)
- Worked closely with writers, animators and world artists to create coherent content
It's sad that such a game was cancelled because it was really going to give the Fable series a run for its money :)