Cutthroat Harbor

Project Overview

Cutthroat Harbor is a multiplayer pirate adventure board game where players are tasked with trying to take hold of the treasured Cutthroat Harbor. The game was created with a team of other Full Sail students and was designed for up to four players, with the game adjusting the difficulty and amount of islands required to conquer according to player count. My main job during this project was Co-lead designer and was also responsible for creating the initial prototype of the game along with another classmate. Along with those responsibilities, I was also responsible for the writings and documentation regarding the game, such as the Game Design Document, playtesting logs, and also concerns/other general notes needed to make sure production of the project flowed.

Game Design Document

Role in Development

Co-led development of game including
- Game setting and overall lore
- Creation of base game mechanics
  - Co-developed ship classes to add variety to the game
  - Created hijack system to add risk reward factor that wasn’t just direct combat
  - Further created game mechanics to add randomness and player initiative to increase fun factor
Wrote and revised documentation for project including
- Drafted, revised, and finalize Game Design Document with the oversight of my other teammates
- Revised player Rulebook for language clarity
- Wrote flowcharts to visually understand player turn order/actions.
Playtested game with other teammates along with:
- Creating and keeping track of playtesting notes
- Organized notes from highest priority to lowest and personally tackled high priority issues
- Writing down repetitive strategies and adjusting game design to avoid one single best strategy from dominating gameplay

Post Mortem

For having been created in such a short time, Cutthroat Harbor was an incredibly fun time to create. It was fun to have all the designers really into the subject matter and trying their best to replicate a simple but interesting pirate life. Project wise we managed to accomplish this feat by focusing our main efforts in creating a basic, but entertaining base game that included base capture, combat, betrayal, etc. but then branched off to add that real “fun factor”. Mechanics such as the hijack system made it possible to mitigate the negative feedback loop of having not enough ships to pose a threat to other players. Balance worked out better than expected as the multiple ship types worked as intended and there wasn’t one ship type that was ostensibly better.

Our biggest downfall with the project came in the form of being unable to completely break away from what our team called “The Monopoly Problem.” It was sometimes easy to get a good head start in the game by just being lucky and getting the right equipment which then in turn made it easy for that player to completely dominate the game. However, in playtesting it was common for uneasy alliances to form to compensate for each player lacking in something the “winning” player had. It helped lessen the problem we were having but I do feel like it was something we could have handled better if we had more time to develop.