CREATIVE LEADER IN VIDEO GAMES •
AUTHOR • VOICE ACTOR
LORI HYRUP
Genre:
Year:
Team Size:
Role:
Platform(s):
Engine:
Real-time strategy (RTS)
2013-2014
30
Creative Director
Android, iPhone
Unity
Started Out as R&D
Flagship began as an R&D project to create a fun, high-fidelity real-time strategy game for mobile at a time when mobile game development was still finding its feet. We discovered the fun very quickly, and that R&D project became a full-fledged game project within two months.
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It Became a Game
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As the creative director for the project, I guided the look and feel, the gameplay development, and the narrative development of the project.
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Ahoy, Pirates!
To keep this pirate game interesting, players could equip different pirate characters on their ships, which played a role similar to equipment, such as the type found in RPGs. Different characters provided different benefits to the player's ships. We also set this game in a fantasy world to provide a greater breadth of races, classes, and leverage magic, which allowed the expansion of collectible pirates. The game featured over 400 individual pirates.
Here Be Dragons
They also had an ultimate, in the form of a type of dragon or sea creature they could summon (to either attack or defend).
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The purpose of the video below was to demonstrate our visual target in trailer format.
Below is a render test for our visual target.
Below is a visual target test for ship animations.
Below is a destruction test for our buildings and structures.
The Rules
When I joined the project, I had two rules to follow:​​
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It had to be a pirate game
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It had to have dragons
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Ahoy, Pirates!
To keep this pirate game interesting, players could equip different pirate characters on their ships, which played a role similar to equipment, such as the type found in RPGs. Different characters provided different benefits to the player's ships. We also set this game in a fantasy world to provide a greater breadth of races, classes, and leverage magic, which allowed the expansion of collectible pirates. The game featured over 400 individual pirates.
​Here Be Dragons
The player ships also had an ultimate ability in the form of a type of dragon or sea creature, which they could summon. We had many types of dragons designed for our project.
Why Did This Game Not Ship?
During the development of Flagship, another company released a game called Heroe's Charge, which was doing well on the market. Because of unknowns concerning the viability of a ship-based game and inspiration brought upon by this other title, studio leadership asked that we pivot from a ship-based game to a and RPG-lite ground-party game.
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So, that's what we did.
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That shifted us to project Embersoul, which was a mobile D&D RPG. That project was starting to take off, but very soon after pitching it to Wizards of the Coast, our studio acquired the Star Wars license. At that point, it was all hands on deck to create what was to become Star Wars: Uprising.