Puzzle Pirates Developer Q&A Podcast

On December 4, 2009, the first Puzzle Pirates Developer Q&A podcast was released. This gave pirates an opportunity to ask the developers questions via email, and these questions were then answered on the podcast.

The podcast can be downloaded here.

A transcript of this podcast with Hermes and Arcturus is below.

Transcript: December 4, 2009 Podcast
Hermes: Ahoy and welcome pirates of all ages to the first Puzzle Pirates developer Q&A, I'm Hermes, a member of the Puzzle Pirates live team, and I'm here with Arcturus, who's a developer on the Puzzle Pirates team.

Arcturus: Hello everyone.

Hermes: So we've received a lot of questions via email that we'd like to take an opportunity to answer today, so lets get right to it. Our first question is from Coatosilver of Sage, and his question is: how are player feedback, needs and priorities integrated into the development of the game?

Arcturus: Well we're always trying to be proactive about posting to the Game Design forum; asking for feedback, talking about what things are concerning us about the game, and seeing what other players are thinking about it. In addition, there are several of us who read everything that's going on in the Game Design forum, and bring it up in our weekly meetings; we have two weekly meetings, in which we amongst other things go through all of that information, bring it together, look at what types of things we can address in the short term, what types of things need to wait for the long term, and just general nuggets that we might be able to act upon in other ways, that maybe don't fit exactly with what was being discussed in the forums but are interesting and we feel would add to the game.

A good example of all of this, is the discussion that was had relating to Cursed Isles. There were several comments from various player threads around payouts, around difficulties, and those types of things, and through various iterations, we feel we've made a lot of improvements to how all of the various loot, all of the various payouts, and how these things are divided work within Cursed Isles.

Hermes: So, what would you say are the most pressing mid- to long-term issues affecting players right now?

Arcturus: Most pressing issues? I think probably the biggest things are how players can get together to work on the activities they want to do. People want to be able to get groups together to go into Atlantis and things like that. We want, we need to make those things easier to do and get everybody together to do those things. Additionally, colonisation is a major long-term goal in the game and we need to make that be much more rewarding to the players who are participating and successful at it.

Hermes: Our next question comes to us from Duckling on the Hunter Ocean and they asked, in the Game Design forum, many players have expressed considerable frustration with the scarcity of jobbers and the resulting inability to access a large amount of game content. The players have discussed at length a revolutionary change namely allowing ships of all sizes to go out staffed by swabbies. Are you willing to implement a revolutionary change to address this issue?

Arcturus: We've been paying a lot of attention to these discussions in the forums, and there are definitely some intriguing bits that we've been discussing amoungst ourselves. For example, there was a discussion of bringing in swabbies that are able to gun. Maybe not as well as they can do other puzzles, but maybe to some degree. Exactly how this would work, how many you could have and how good they would be is still a matter of further debate, but its not something that we're completely throwing out, its possible we might want to do something with that in the future.

Also there was a discussion of adding a few more swabbies to the ship. This would potentially allow ships to start out on their voyage a little earlier and not have to wait for it to be completely full before they're able to set sail; something like that may be interesting as well.

Central to all of this, however, is the relative worth of a swabbie versus the relative worth of a human jobber. And its important to note that we wish to encourage people to bring jobbers aboard their ships.

But all of those are evolutionary changes, not revolutionary changes. The revolutionary change that you're referring to here is one of allowing any person to solo any ship no matter what size. Something like that unfortunately has the potential to completely undermine a lot of the social aspects of the game. Groups of people working together to accomplish a larger goal is something that we wish to continue to encourage and something like that we'd have to think very long and hard about before we're willing to go and make that type of very major change to the game.

Hermes: So what kind of solutions are you looking at?

Arcturus: Well much more appealing would be any solution that allows for more types of ships to perform the types of activities that people want to do. One of the key complaints is that people wish to take out a large ship maybe to go to Atlantis or something along those lines. A solution that allows players to take part in Sea Monster-like activities especially those similar to Atlantis in smaller ships, war brigs, perhaps even dhows or sloops, would be a much more positive thing than simply allowing large ships to be taken out with a huge number of swabbies.

Hermes: That's probably a good thing; I'm sure the swabbies are still upset that we cut their pay transporting vessels. *laughs* So the next question comes from Artie of Sage, and they wrote in saying, "I'm concerned with what appears to be a significant drop-off in ocean population. Makes gathering mates for pillages or games more difficult, so what, if anything, is being planned to improve the situation for active buccaneers?"

Arcturus: Well you're certainly right that there have been fewer people on the oceans since about September of last year. This does correspond to the drop-off in the global real world economy, and that definitely has had an effect. Additionally, Puzzle Pirates is not a brand new game. It celebrates its sixth anniversary on December 8th. As such, its been around a while, but at the same time we've been able to add new features to the game frequently, and are very proud of that, and it keeps the game fresh. Specific things we're trying to do to address the population issues you'll be seeing in the next couple of releases; the biggest of which is large number of improvements to the jobbing board, both allowing people aboard ships to find people to join them on their voyage, as well as better allowing pirates to find the type of activities that they wish to participate in.

Hermes: Do you have any other plans? I mean, we get a lot of questions on the forums about, say, what we do for advertising.

Arcturus: Well a lot of the players that come to Puzzle Pirates come by way of word of mouth, and thank you for that, that's always wonderful to have. But additionally we have always gotten some number of players through advertising, and in the coming months we do intend to renew our focus on that and add several new partners to hope to get a larger number of new players into the game.

Hermes: We've answered a few of the higher level questions now so lets change gears for a second. Tomrizzo of Hunter writes in to ask, is the Jinxed Idol trophy a repeated action trophy, or a multi-part action trophy?

Arcturus: Well, we don't ever actually answer direct questions about trophies and give out details. Part of the fun of trophies is the mystery and the discussion and the discovery of finding out how they work. Trophies, as a whole, exist to reward types of gameplay that we feel are important or that generally deserve recognition, or for things that are just generally fun.

Hermes: Okay so that was a question on short time goals. So we have another question on long term goals, and it comes to us from Nomura on Midnight and the question is, does there exist a belief amongst you that long-term team goals should be a very important element of Puzzle Pirates, and if so is there a belief that successfully blockading colonized islands should be more rewarding?

Arcturus: Absolutely long term goals for teams and individuals are very important for any persistent game like Puzzle Pirates. As one of these goals, island blockading does need to be rewarded more than it currently is, we've been trying to address this in a few different ways. The first of these is with island attractions, you've seen the explorers hall in the most recent patch, and this is the first of several different types of island attractions the governors will be able to put onto their islands. If an island isn't providing the services that a flag isn't interested in, then maybe this is an incentive to take over the island. Additionally we were hoping to add more controls and transparency to the taxation rates on an island. Currently the governor has the ability to control a single value for that, and this is applied to all industries on an island, but if a governor has the ability to instead target particular industries that he wishes to encourage or discourage on his island, then this adds island diversity as well as reasons for flags to potentially take over additional islands or other islands that maybe have a lot of industry already on them. That industry with the transparency could easily be seen as a revenue source of the flag that's taking over the island.

Hermes: So what about putting a tax slider on individual buildings on the island?

Arcturus: that's certainly the logical extension and it's definitely intriguing. The big concern there is griefing, and we need to put some kind of negatives in place to prevent abuse, but we haven't figured out what those might be.

Hermes: Okay. So blockade cost? That's one of the biggest hurdles for a flag getting into the blockading game, are we planning or doing anything concerning that.

Arcturus: It's definitely something we're looking at, we don't have any particular immediate solutions for it at this time, but it's definitely something we're paying attention to, as the cost of running a blockade has went up recently.

Hermes: Okay, so since we're talking about colonization, Verlool from Malachite writes in asking, has there been any developments in titans since it was announced a long time ago, and if so what are the plans in releasing in the near future?

Arcturus: The titan was a proposed form of sea monster which players could sail out and attempt to defeat, and if it was not defeated it would reach an isle and start destroying buildings on that island. Player reaction at the time was mixed, shop keepers were worried about their buildings, others were excited about the prospect of islands becoming more dynamic. We're in favor of island ownership becoming more dynamic, but this cannot be accomplished at the unfair expense of those who have earned their place as shopkeepers. We'd really prefer to address these types of issues with things a little bit more subtle, such as the aforementioned governor tax controls and other reasons for flags to take over islands.

Hermes: Moving on from the titan, I recently put a couple posts up in game design asking for feedback about Atlantis. Now, a few people have complained about the balance issues with the triketos maps and non triketos maps. What are we planning to do to address those issues the future?

Arcturus: We've already got a couple fixes ready for the next release, the first of these is that the gorgonyx and the archelon will now drop a couple fewer dragoons per shot when they get near your ship. The second is that we've changed a few of the monster spawns within all the different types of Atlantis maps.

Hermes: Cool, So yeah, those threads are still up on the forums so we totally welcome additional feedback on the future of Atlantis and the changes we made there. Alright, next question. This was sent to us from an anonymous pirate, and they'd like to know if any effort has been made towards fixing the scoring of gunning, to allow for the running of familiar competitions to be run again in the future?

Arcturus: We've already addressed the initial issues of gunnery scoring that were negatively impacting puzzle competitions. Now we're working with the ocean masters to get to a point where everyone is comfortable enough with the state of gunning that the events can be restored, but the final call will be made by the ocean masters since their the ones that have to deal with resolving any complaints.

Hermes: Well, the players would be happy to hear that, I mean I would be happy to hear it too if I wasn't so terribly at gunning. Speaking about puzzles we have a couple questions here, one's from Alexpeng of Viridian, he wants to know what is the next puzzle to be released and when is it coming, We also have another one from Josephdaniel of Midnight who wants to know when the tailoring, weaving crafting puzzles will be released?

Arcturus: Puzzles are some of the most enjoying and satisfying parts of the game to work on, but they also take a significant amount of design, development and art time to complete. The prototypes for the weaving, tailoring puzzles were selected as winners of the grand crafting puzzle project, not quite two years ago, We're happy to announce now that in fact weaving will be the next puzzle we will work on. We don't have a specific date yet selected for that but hoping to complete it sometime in the early portion of next year.

Hermes: Cool, speaking of new content, Lj of Midnight would like to know how many expeditions do we anticipate adding to the game and are there any more currently in the pipeline?

Arcturus: The expeditions were a great addition to the game because they're infinitely expandable. They fit smoothly into the game experience and we can expand them beyond their current guantlet-like incarnations. You can expect further encounters with the imperials, brigand kings and other general piratey goodness in future expeditions.

Hermes: That sounds pretty awesome, So, we probably have time for one more question and we're gonna go with one from Orsino on Viridian and his question is, at what point do you think the game will be finished? Will you ever sit back and say we've done enough, there's enough for them to play with, and what we have is what really works for them.

Arcturus: Finished has never been a goal on Puzzle Pirates, you can see this on all the game play elements that we've included with expansion in mind, this includes sea monster lairs where new types of lairs can be added such as cursed isles was added in addition to Atlantis. You can this in the brigand kings where we've added additional kings as time has went on, we've added new puzzles both crafting and duty puzzles over the course of the life of the game and will continue to do so. There's also the expeditions which we've already talked about a bit, and the new attractions where we have a large number of options for new types of buildings that governors will be able to add to their islands.

Hermes: And we can still add all kinds of fancy new hats and stuff too, right?

Arcturus: Hats, and all the other kinds of items, of course.

Hermes: Well, that is all the time we have today, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for the first Puzzle pirates Developer Q&A podcast and I'd also like to thank Arcturus for taking time out of his busy day to be here.

Arcturus: No problem, it's been fun.

Hermes: And remember everyone we're always looking for your feedback, your ideas, your thoughts on anything we add to the game on the game design forums so I hope to see you there. I am Hermes and we'll talk to you later.