The folks at Pirates of the Burning Sea have posted a new dev journal where they explain their vision for the game, examine the consequences of the vision statement, and look at how far along they are in achieving that goal.

One of the problems with working on a game—or on any project, really—for as long as we’ve been working on Pirates is that it often becomes hard to remember the big-picture inspiration that started the whole thing. You inevitably get bogged down in the details of implementing each feature, debugging each game system, and following up on each little minor task that, taken collectively, form the foundation of your game.

We’ve been making changes, incremental improvements, and bug fixes since launch, but in the background, we’ve been stepping back to look at that big-picture inspiration again, and ask ourselves: What did we make? What did we want to make? What would we like to be making now?

We found ourselves in general agreement on most of these questions, and after conversations with many people at FLS, I sat down to write a single defining statement for Pirates. What did we, collectively, believe Pirates was all about? The answer is our ‘vision statement’:

“Pirates of the Burning Sea is a competitive game in which players take the role of adventurers in a romanticized version of the Caribbean in the Age of Sail, and seek fame, fortune, and glory for themselves and their nations.”

This isn’t necessarily where we are now; it’s how we all view the game that we’d like Pirates to be. It’s both a description of what we’ve made, and a goal at which to aim.

This is a pretty dense summary, and has a lot of implications, which I’m going to briefly sketch out one at a time.

Read more here.