Pirates of the Burning Sea : Current Developers Log |
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The devs for Pirates of the Burning Sea have been making regular updates to the game and have been trying to keep the public in the loop by posting a detailed log as they are completed. Here is a copy of the most recent log which was added today. For those you who are unfamiliar with this MMO and would like to know more, you can check out our introductory post which outlines some of the key features of the game as well as some gameplay trailers.Also, the game is currently in its beta stages and the devs are looking for beta testers. If you're interested you can sign up here.
BSharp's Current Developers Log
Town Creation
Greetings from Flying LabÂ’s art department! There have been a lot of Artco developments of late, weÂ’ve staffed up a bit, hired some of our interns, and hammered out our process for town production. I'd like to share a bit about our progress thus far, and talk a bit, if I may, about towns in general.
National Identity
ItÂ’s important to us to make sure that the towns of each nation in our game has a visual identity that will please our history fans while having visual flair and interest enough (bending the truth a little at times) to ensure an entertaining and immersive experience.
The styles for the European colonies that populate our Caribbean are a mixture of the research we found from actual European towns and their Caribbean counterparts. WeÂ’ve leaned more in the direction of Europe (especially with the French) than we have toward the actual colonies of the time. Historically, the colonies tended to be more anonymous in their identity and were often an eclectic cacophony of architectural styles, with few exceptions. However, we wanted harmony, identity, and a feeling of familiarity in our towns and cities: if you sign up to be British, we want you to feel like you are a part of that culture. As most of you know, the nations represented in our game are French, Spanish, British, and Pirate.
Pirate Culture
Obviously there was no single pirate culture or nation in history; but adventure books, movies and plays have evolved a very well developed, if fictional, identity for pirates and their surroundings. Nathan, our chief town architect, has tried to create towns that resonate with that image. His pirate towns are designed to feel as if theyÂ’d once belonged to one of the other three cultures, but have since been conquered and are now in ill-repair after having been overrun by pirates.
Nate
Nathan has been our sole producer of town exteriors so far. He is a one-man-army. WeÂ’ve thrown a staggeringly huge problem at him and heÂ’s tirelessly yielded spectacular results. To date he has created 6 towns of enormous proportion, each with its own personality. His pirate town, frequently featured in our screenshots, is a popular favorite and his fishing towns are unbelievable.
The New Process
The game itself will have something like 130 ports, ranging from small villages to sublime capitol cities. Nathan may be an army, but itÂ’s unreasonable to ask him to crank out 100+ towns before we launch. Consequently our environment lead, Jeff, has devised a pipeline that will employ multiple artists for town assembly, utilizing peopleÂ’s strengths for various parts of production and using NathanÂ’s original towns as the Holy Grail to guide the new art. The process will work like this:
First, Taylor, lead designer, writes up a description of the town and its buildings.
Second, a library of buildings is being created based on TaylorÂ’s descriptions. Our library is being assembled both by internal art guys and an external out-sourcing company.
Third, Jason, environment artist, works closely with Taylor to create a town layout. (Jason also does concept art for buildings among other modeling/drawing environment tasks.)
Once the layout is established, we have various artists filling out the roles for terrain creation, texturing, prop and building placement, nav mesh creation, etc.
My Role
My role in town production is more in the finishing touches. As an artist, my work has a potent sense of atmosphere, color and lighting. I tend to work on skies, lighting settings, and ocean settings (color, reflectivity, wave effects). I also do a bit of texture work. I feel strongly about art directors taking a role in production. Art-director-talk is an overrated skill; everyone on the art team should have production skill enough to improve the overall quality of the art.
Future
One of the big tasks ahead for towns is creating the capitol cities. These are going to be enormous sprawling metropolises with distinctive neighborhoods and lots of activity; consequently they will require huge amounts of geometry and texture resources and so they present new technical as well as artistic challenges. For instance weÂ’ll be testing our chamber technology problem-solving-skills in completely fresh ways. WeÂ’re looking forward to it.
[Via Official Website]
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