Pirates Of The Burning Sea: New Developers Journal!

Taelorn has posted a new Dev Log! This time he talks about data driven design of games, and how its effected the game lately.

First of all, our game needs tuning. Lots of tuning. That's true of any game that is approaching its release date. Tuning tasks are huge and time consuming because they are boundless. "Create 10 pieces of outfitting" is a straightforward task and it is easy to say that it is complete. "Ship Tuning" is a nebulous task that can go on forever. As the designer, I have to make painful decisions to say that tuning tasks are done even when I know there is more work to do, just so that I can move on to the next task. Then I gradually work through tuning different areas of the game until I end up back at that original task. This iterative process gives me more time to gather feedback and evaluate the impact of my changes, but it is still painful to stop a task when I have a long list of changes.

I really want to get my hands on this game and try it out!

You can read the entire journal over at the Pirates Site!