Pirates Of The Burning Sea: Interview: Rusty at Firing Squad!

Sorry for the lack of updates folks! It seems that Flying Lab Software has been quite busy pushing out another wave of closed beta invites, and haven't had much time to give us news. Russell "Rusty" Williams was recently interviewed by FiringSquad, and talks about the development process behind Pirates of the Burning Sea.

...We've done two things that have gotten us to this point. The first is that we're self-financed. We write our own checks and we take our own risks. We have no outside investors or publishers who are keeping us afloat. We're very fortunate to be in that situation. Of course, ask any Hollywood producer what the first rule of making movies is and they'll tell you it's that you never spend your own money to make a project; you always use someone else's. We broke that rule and we run the risk if we fail, but it also means we have the autonomy we need to succeed on our own terms.

The second thing we've done is to be very smart and very cautious about growth. We started this project five years ago with a staff of six people and we kept the team small and focused for a long time. In the last two years we've gone from about thirty people to more than seventy, ramping up as we got more and more of the big pieces of the game in good shape. A lot of new MMO studios seem to think you need seventy people on day one and that's just a huge mistake. You need to stay small and focused while you iterate on your core gameplay, architecture, and pipeline...

You can check out this recent news clip here.