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Pirates of the Burning Sea: Dev Journal #2
Reaching milestones is the topic of Russell Williams' second developer journal, as he and the team prepare for PAX.
By Guest Writer on August 03, 2005
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Editor's Note: On the first Wednesday of every month, Russell Williams will join us to examine an issue relating to Pirates of the Burning Sea. Last month's journal examined growth and can be found here. The Game's Executive Producer Discusses Milestones
As part of that effort, we’re revamping the UI. We initially started with some dev art for the prototype, and have been experimenting with different visual looks while we’ve been refining the functionality. Now that we know what we want, we can spend the time on putting in the visual look without fear that we might later change and have to throw away work. For those of you who saw the game at E3, the new UI is more period-appropriate, and is a lot “gamier” than our old UI, while still being cleaner. With our mission design team finally in place (we just hired the last person this week), we’re now putting in missions that are going to ship with the game. While fighting’s fun, it’s much more satisfying to have context for your actions, and we’ve been having a blast with the mission design. And speaking of combat, the first pass of the skill system is now in. These skills are intended to model the kinds of things you might reasonably be able to do as the captain of a ship. The goal is not to have ‘superpowers’ for ships, and every skill has to pass a gauntlet of criticism: is this possible? Is this plausible? Does it make gameplay more interesting? In every case, we’re looking to expand tactical options, provide tradeoffs, and give players a more complex combat experience. In the end, the final set of skills will act to support smart ship tactics, not replace them. We also have a lot of new art, including new interior environments, a Pirate Town, more female avatars, news clothes, and so on.  advertisement 
As such, we’re going to start our alpha testing program at the end of this milestone, which means the beginning of September. The alpha program will start small, and focus on mission/combat testing. As we get comfortable with that, we’ll start adding more people, and Alpha will gently segue into Beta. While we plan on keeping the testing program closed, we will occasionally have open beta weekends where everyone is welcome to play. The other big news around here is that we’ve finally started talking about our new strategic RvR system. There’s a lot of innovative new stuff here, but what really excites me is that everyone gets to play. Moving cargo is as important as sinking enemy ships, and whether you’re a go-it-alone kind of guy, or a member of a huge guild, there’s a place for you to help advance your nation’s interests. Check it out in our latest dev log on the site. That’s it for now. See you at PAX! - Russell Williams, Executive Producer - Pirates of the Burning Sea Many thanks to Russell and Flying Labs for doing this! Please, let them know your thoughts on their hype meter. |
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