The Current
Birdisland
Developer
-
Publisher
Genre
deckbuilding, roguelike
Platform
PC
Status
unreleased
Role
Lead Designer
The Current is a sci-fi deckbuilding roguelike set in a post-environmental-collapse future.
Players control Farah, an explorer from a failing Moon colony, sent to the fragmented remains of Terra in search of the Lodestar, a lost orbital platform that could restore contact and supply lines between the two worlds.
Gameplay centers on repeatable, run-based exploration across procedurally populated islands. Each run challenges players to triangulate the Lodestar’s position, with failure sending them back to the beginning. The unique, grid-based combat is driven by a customizable card deck and supported by light RPG progression and narrative branching.
Thematically, the game explores fears around climate change and migration, framing Farah’s journey as both a survival challenge and a social one, meeting new communities, navigating tension, and exchanging knowledge. Narrative progression is structured across multiple runs, with new character insights, items, and environmental details revealed through retrial and experimentation.
The game has been developed for PC with an emphasis on scalable design systems that support both short play sessions and long-term engagement, and the possibility of porting to consoles and handheld devices in mind.
Set across a series of semi-open islands, each run involves reaching three communication relays to triangulate the location of the Lodestar. Progress is persistent yet modular, encouraging replayability through layered mechanics and incremental narrative discovery. Gameplay centers on experimentation with builds, route selection, and item synergies.
Themes of forced migration, environmental collapse, and technological decay are woven into both mechanics and story. Design pillars include “Discovery Through Retrial” and “Combinatorial Depth,” aiming to create meaningful variation across repeated playthroughs.
The combat system is turn-based and centers on a deck-and-grid mechanic that blends tactical sequencing with resource management.
Players place cards from their hand onto a grid, creating a persistent layout that gradually fills over time. Each turn, chains are formed by selecting a sequence of cards from the grid. Executing this chain consumes energy and applies effects based on the selected cards. This creates a decision space around optimizing card placement, chain sequencing, and energy use.
The system encourages early aggressive play when energy is abundant and the grid is sparse, gradually shifting toward more constrained, strategic decisions as the grid fills and energy becomes limited. This progression reinforces planning, foresight, and adaptation across the course of turns and encounters.
I took over leadership of The Current after several lead transitions, inheriting a highly ambitious exploration RPG concept with daily content updates. Working closely with the design team, I managed and mentored, we refocused the project into a tight, engaging deckbuilding roguelike with a clear identity and polished core gameplay.
My key contributions to the project include leading the redesign of the core combat system and overall game flow, introducing procedural elements to enhance replayability, designing and balancing the game economy, and introducing major features like trading and progression rewards. As well as improving development pipelines by co-creating a tool that generates in-game content from table data and streamlining the UI workflow.
Additional tasks included supervising level design, co-developing an exploration and hidden loot system, refining UI, designing cards (both layout and content), contributing to tech art through custom decals and shaders, and conducting playtests.
