CEO of Flying Labs Entertainment, Rusty Williams, has updated the Pirates of the Burning Sea community with a new devblog !

Right now what we’re most focused on is the new revamp of the avatar combat system. Ever since we shipped, we’ve been planning to go back and re-examine the sword fighting from first principals. Ship combat has had the advantage of being built, ripped apart, and rebuilt. Avatar combat has been going through the same process, and you can read more about it in Isildur’s dev log where he describes the thought process that went into building the new system.

He even mentions the word we've all been waiting for: Expansion!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a general overview log, and we’ve had a lot of activity going on over here to catch up on.

First, we moved in new offices back in late August. I’m not really a fan of moving, because I hate taking the time hit, but the simple fact is that we were running out of space. The old office space was built out for around 30 people, back when we were making single player games. After we started Pirates, we packed in as many people as possible into the third floor, and then expanded out to the second floor, taking that over. That technically “worked, but it was a very crowded and difficult situation. Now that we’re expanding again, the old space just couldn’t accommodate us.

So after much searching, we’re now downtown in the north part of Seattle, just a few blocks from my favorite steak house, El Gauchos, and the amazing Zeek’s Pizza. Not only do we have a lot more space for people but we’re all on the same floor, which makes running over to have a quick in-person meeting much easier. We also now have a server room for our internal servers (the others are over at Internap in Tukwilla), better security, and some great views.

One of the reasons why we’re expanding came from taking stock of how the company was organized and resources allocated. Previously, our groups were extremely independent, which meant that ConCo (the mission creation group) acted independently of ArtCo (I’ll let you guess what that group does) and so on. Each group had deliverables for the other groups, which were all stack ranked as to whether they’d go into a given milestone.

What we’ve been experimenting with to great success is to allocate more dev resources to specific areas. For example, we now have a dev who supports the artists. He gives them new shaders, builds new tools and pipelines, and works on improving the performance of the game in general. He’s a really smart guy, and has done fantastic work.

We’re so happy with the work that he’s done that we’re adopting the same system to more groups. For example, we’ve just hired a couple of devs, one of whom will focus on supporting ConCo. They’ve done an amazing amount with the tools we’ve given them, but now that we’ve moved over from standard encounters to hand-created missions, we want to give them better tools to make them more efficient and to enable new gameplay types.

We’re also adding devs to the core team as well, which helps us better split our time between reactive improvements and building new systems, such as the Skirmish system. Skirmish is big: it’s a multi-milestone project that will provide a great learning tool of PvP for new players as well as provide new gameplay types of PvP. This is essentially milestone one, and we’ll be talking more about specific implementation when we get closer to the actual delivery.

Right now what we’re most focused on is the new revamp of the avatar combat system. Ever since we shipped, we’ve been planning to go back and re-examine the sword fighting from first principals. Ship combat has had the advantage of being built, ripped apart, and rebuilt. Avatar combat has been going through the same process, and you can read more about it in Isildur’s dev log where he describes the thought process that went into building the new system.

But it’s not just Isildur who is working on this. Avatar combat is a major push for the entire company. The animations need to be changed to account for the new system, the sounds have been replaced, and all of the avatar combat missions in the game need to be rebalanced to account for the new rules. Everysingle…one. Once we’ve rebalanced the encounters we’ll start going in and improving the missions themselves. We’ve been waiting on redoing these missions for quite some time, because we knew the combat system was going to change. When we originally built them, the combat system was in parallel development, so we had to make guesses as to what kinds of fights would be appropriate for it, guesses that sometimes turned out to be wrong. Designing the encounters with the full knowledge of the new system will result in much more interesting and intense fights.

Avatar combat is, to my knowledge, the last major revamp we have planned for the game. After that it’s more focus on new features, such as the in-progress skirmish, and its elder game brother, player-governed ports. Which means it’s time to ramp up advertising.

Our initial foray into banner advertising was very successful, so successful that it was a kind of slap your head “why didn’t we start this earlier? moment. As we’ve been rolling this out, we’re learning what works and doesn’t work, and we’re expanding out the program from just straight advertising to affiliate programs. That requires some tracking work on SOE’s side that they’re doing, and once we get that, we’ll really ramp things up. In the meantime, our focus is on getting a new launcher using SOE’s Station Launcher (which is much better than the old launcher) with the latest build to reduce the overhead to new players trying out the game.

Finally, the last big news on the horizon is expansion. We’re starting to look at where we go next to build out the world of Pirates, and doing our scheduling estimates. If you’ve got an idea burning in your head, first, see a doctor, but second, write it down as a response and let us know where you would like to see the borders pushed back.

Of course, we’ll continue to deliver new content and feature updates as we march forward, as we have many more tales to tell on the Burning Seas. See you there!