Pirate Haven - hub location for an open-world survival game (Pirates Republic)
Pirate Haven – Pirates Republic
On Pirates Republic, I served as Lead Gameplay Designer, overseeing most aspects of the game’s design. With a tight timeframe leading up to the alpha, I focused on creating exemplary locations that showcased the project’s environmental vision.
The resulting Pirate Haven location functions as a regional hub, providing essential facilities for visiting captains, including a tavern, marketplace, brothel, and clinic.
The hub was largely constructed using KitBash assets, allowing for rapid prototyping while maintaining a cohesive and visually compelling pirate-themed aesthetic. The location demonstrates my ability to balance design, gameplay functionality, and visual storytelling under tight production constraints.
In addition to mechanics and level design, I was also responsible for the game’s dynamic lighting setup. To achieve the expected results, I created a wide range of time-of-day and weather presets, leveraging both the Atmos plugin for Unity and the engine’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), which—visually—I consider at least on par with what Unreal has to offer.
General view of the hub as seen from a ship approaching the harbor, highlighting its verticality-focused structure and key landmarks.
Top-down view of the entire location. Notably, the entire level layout follows a 1-meter grid, with buildings placed using only two rotation angles. This is because the city also serves as a showcase for the player-oriented building system I design.
Birds-eye look onto the settlement from main gate side. This perspective nicely presents the spatial relationships between key areas.
A beauty shot of one of the island’s more natural areas, highlighting terrain, vegetation, and environmental detail.
View of the marketplace under cloudy, foggy conditions. This is one of the more atmospheric lighting conditions I have implemented. leveraging the volumetric fog features of HDRP.
View of one of the settlement’s streets, it showcases the player pathing and environmental details within the hub.
The loading cranes, one of the most prominent environmental features of the central area of the hub. It added an orierntation landmark while emphasizing verticality and practical aspect of to the harbor area.
Another view of one of the settlement’s streets, highlighting the hub’s layout and architectural details.
View near the town’s well under sunny lighting. By design the settlement was to have a bright, lively atmosphere.
View near the tavern at sunset. When carefully configured, the warm lighting and atmospheric moods are where the HDRP really excells at.
Movie clip presenting the occlusion system applied to the location as one of the key optimisation methods.