Captain.tv
Captain.tv is a studio focused on making games for streamers and their communities to play together. During my time there I worked on two projects, the game that started it all, Stream Raiders, and its sister project Stream Pirates.
On Stream Raiders I was responsible for designing, pitching, building and overseeing monthly content for our live ops cadence. I also helped build out processes to remove feature ambiguity, gain team alignment around features, and to ensure we consitently hit our release targets.
On Stream Raiders I was responsible for designing, pitching, building and overseeing monthly content for our live ops cadence. I also helped build out processes to remove feature ambiguity, gain team alignment around features, and to ensure we consitently hit our release targets.
Stream Raiders
Stream Raiders is a battle sim in which streamers and their viewers battle together to defeat monsters, earn XP and prizes. A streamers community members can place units on a map while streamers are live streaming their main content. When a battle is ready to begin streams can switch to streaming Stream Raiders and play out the battle with their community watching.
Watch the video below as AlfredGG gives an overview of the game.
My first project at Captain.tv was as a content designer. I worked with art and engineering to design and develop monthly content for streamers to play with their viewers. This required designing enemies and levels based around the theme of the monthly event. Since this was a battle sim, players did not have control of their units after the battle started, but watched a simulation with their favorite streamer to see the outcome of the battle. Levels had to be designed so that interesting battle blobs formed on screen for streamers to call out and do play by play / color commentary. This meant splitting levels up into several main lanes for units to path through similar to League of Legends or DoTA maps.
This led to the design team developing statues and other objects that could either affect the entire map or a small area granting buffs or debuffs to player or enemy units. Additionally terrain tiles were given some minor effects, usually speed buffs or debuffs, to add variance to players' strategy of timing when and where unit groups would meet on the battlefield. The design team also had the ability to control unit spawns, which would allow us to reuse maps but change the probabilities of enemies or special statues appearing, based on where a player was in level progression.
more coming soon...
Watch the video below as AlfredGG gives an overview of the game.
My first project at Captain.tv was as a content designer. I worked with art and engineering to design and develop monthly content for streamers to play with their viewers. This required designing enemies and levels based around the theme of the monthly event. Since this was a battle sim, players did not have control of their units after the battle started, but watched a simulation with their favorite streamer to see the outcome of the battle. Levels had to be designed so that interesting battle blobs formed on screen for streamers to call out and do play by play / color commentary. This meant splitting levels up into several main lanes for units to path through similar to League of Legends or DoTA maps.
This led to the design team developing statues and other objects that could either affect the entire map or a small area granting buffs or debuffs to player or enemy units. Additionally terrain tiles were given some minor effects, usually speed buffs or debuffs, to add variance to players' strategy of timing when and where unit groups would meet on the battlefield. The design team also had the ability to control unit spawns, which would allow us to reuse maps but change the probabilities of enemies or special statues appearing, based on where a player was in level progression.
Roles and Responsibilities:
- Design monthly event content which included:
- Design engaging monthly event themes and mechanics
- Design and create engaging levels, enemies and bosses
- Collaborate with art and engineering to gain alignment and task breakdowns for feature work
- Integrate units, art and level content for events
- Run playtests, synthesize feedback into actionable items and iterate on designs
- Analyze and tune event levels based on data after launch
- Designed 2 of the most well received events:
- Olympiad an ancient greek themed event which saw the introduction of map entities that had an effect on some or all units on a map. These entities took the form of Greek god statues.
- Elemental which expanded on the god statue concept by introducing elemental crystals that had smaller AoE's and imbued units with elemental powers. This led to fun interactions between elements that were strong / weak towards each other, and introduced a level of startegy to the game that excited the community.
more coming soon...