Pirates of the Burning Sea: Dev Journal & Screens

Dana · August 2005

Flying Labs Executive Producer Russell Williams has panned his second journal for the site. The first Wednesday of every month, we bring you a new article from Russell. This month, he looks at their preperation for a major milestone. In addition to the journal, we also carry two brand new screenshots.

Since I last wrote, we finished our previous milestone and have started a new one. Our milestones are usually 6-8 weeks, but this one is a bit shorter. The reason for this is PAX (pennyarcadeexpo.com), the game show in Seattle being run by the Penny Arcade guys. Were looking forward to meeting our fans whove been coming by the forums, and well be out in force staffing our demo stations. This is the first time that weve shown the game to the general public, and this milestone is all about finishing off the basics and putting a nice sheen of polish on top of it.

As part of that effort, were revamping the UI. We initially started with some dev art for the prototype, and have been experimenting with different visual looks while weve 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.

You can read the journal and see the screenshots here.