Pirates of the Burning Sea Executive Producer Russell Williams has penned the first in a series of monthly developer journals about the game. The first article focuses on the concept of "growth".
Hi, I’m Russell Williams, Executive Producer on Flying Lab’s Pirates of the Burning Sea (www.burningsea.com). The theme of this developer journal is growth. When we started working on the game, we knew we wanted to make a game that was different than the current crop, and whenever you’re creating something new, you have to be willing to experiment. Unfortunately, experimentation produces quite a bit of bad along with the good, and throwing away that work is always painful. But it’s even more painful if you have a full art team that’s been cranking away in a dead-end direction for half a year.
That’s why we started with a very small core group, about six people, working on the broad design of the game. We built the core elements of the game, prototyping the basic gameplay and systems, until we were sure we had a great game. Without having invested a great deal of time and money in dead end directions, it let us be ruthless in making the right decisions for the project, rather than marching down a path that was going to hold us back in the future. |
You can read the entire journal and see the screenshots at this link.