Designing for Pirates Part 1

Discovery

It’s been almost three years since I’ve been working on Firelock Games’ Blood & Plunder and I haven’t had the chance to write about my journey so far. Let’s resolve that a bit. Prior to Firelock, my experiences with tabletop games were a combination of Monopoly, Chinese checkers, and Parchis.

Blood & Plunder while in the same category of other “tabletop games”, is far from a board game. It is a historical miniatures game. I had no clue that such things existed. My first time trying it was a disaster and I honestly don’t think I’ll ever get any good at it. It looked complicated and, with all of its different components, it is. First, you have unit cards full of stats that tells you how well your units can hit or how good you avoid getting killed. All of this based on how good you roll dice, which is totally random. Second, there’s the measuring tapes that you use to measure your moves and the math involved in it. Third, there’s also your opponent’s the line of sight that you have to beware of constantly so you don’t get a surprise ambush of sorts. Finally there’s all the extra rules and tests you have to learn in order to play the game properly and to add more flavor to your units. I didn’t even get to mention the naval games or the ship movements, but that is a another story.

Despite the fact that miniatures gaming isn’t really my thing, I was drawn in by the immersive concept and the miniature soldiers caught my attention. My favorite part was the theme. It was real historical pirates. That was new. Most kids I’ve met in college here in the US were obsessed with Jack Sparrow and, despite that being cool and all, I never really cared much for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, to be honest. However, my exposure to pirates was very different. Growing up, I was introduced to old Errol Flynn films and all those adventure books written by Alejandro Dumas that I read when I was in middle school.

Back in early 2016, my initial gig with Firelock was to work on some ads for Blood & Plunder and the company’s landing page for the game. In the design world, I’m known as a generalist. That is why I ended up working not only on Firelock Games’ marketing materials and website, but also on their branding and game component design.

I was lucky enough to find out that a lot of the existing assets such as company and game logos were done by a professional. That made my job a lot easier. Some of the initial concepts and ideas had been laid out too! The challenge was to make sense of all of that and turn it into a cohesive system. Basically, my job was to connect all the dots and find the right visual tone for the game.

Concept

The core concept of Blood & Plunder as described by Mike Tuñez, the lead designer, was a very simple, but very tactical gameplay, flavored with historical accuracy and a lot of adventure. The word immersive jumped out to me right away and it was something that I also decided to apply throughout the process.

Process

My approach for the design process was inspired by designers that work on film props, specifically, the House of Mina-Lima. They are the ones responsible for the props in all the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them films. I did a lot of reading about them and their design process for the films back in college and I found their work fascinating.

They pull a lot of influences from design history. They do their research and gather a lot of material from earlier periods in history and implement the visual style and even more traditional techniques in their prop designs. Their process, combined with extreme attention to detail and a bit of a DIY mentality achieves immersive and realistic set pieces that are so distinctive in Mina-Lima’s films.

Research

Popular movie franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean or other popular pirate films with a lot of fantasy in them were out of the picture. The first place to look for references was, what I like to call, my design bibles: Megg’s History of Graphic Design and Taschen’s Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Vol. 1. Those two books are my go-tos for beginning any design project. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. I always work with references on what is proven to work and, in this case, I needed to have a sound understanding of how graphics were used back in the 17th century. I was also provided with plenty of sources because Mike is a pirate otaku. We also had outside assistance from well-known historian, Benerson Little. He’s the scholar who worked as a consultant for the award-winning Starz show, Black Sails. Both of them provided me with access to premium historical content.

I learned that the 17th century was a very quiet time for printing innovation. A lot of the graphic elements were still from printing blocks used from earlier centuries,
specifically, the Renaissance. This was useful because it helped me narrow my search for authentic graphics. There was another interesting discovery: the lack of technology advancement didn’t stop the rise of literature around that period. The Europeans were publishing books like never before. This also allowed me to find plenty of material to get inspiration from.

The most common typeface used on printing material was Caslon. That was another piece of good information since it helped me find the right typefaces to use for the period.

Now all the research and seeing people playing and testing the game was not enough. I had the historical references but I needed to add some fun-and-adventure aspect.

Video Games Influence

I was immersed completely. Between my own professional research, hourly historical lectures, and the never-ending stream of sea shanties wafting in from the office next door, I was inspired. It also helped that we had a fantastic photographer with a great eye and beautifully immersive terrain for presentation. It was most definitely not all on me.

In Part 2 I will go in depth about the design and prototyping process.

Industry:

Tabletop Miniatures Games