Leaving the Lab

Friday was my last day at Flying Lab. I worked there on Pirates of the Burning Sea for three years and three weeks. I had not been happy in my job for some time. For starters I was tired of working on pirate material. It's been nine years since I wrote Death in Freeport and I've been working on pirate oriented stuff off and on for most of that time. After Pirates of the Burning Sea launched, I hoped to move on to a new game and get a chance to lead the narrative design effort from the ground up (PotBS was several years into development before I came on board). There were many proposals and many meetings with potential publishers, but none of the big projects ever got a green light. So it was just week after week of grinding out new content for the game post-launch. Once you've written over five hundred missions that involve a ship combat or a sword fight, it gets a little old.

On top of all that, I had of course been continuing to run Green Ronin and for the last year design the Dragon Age RPG as well. I worked just about every weekend of the last three years on GR and most of my "vacations" were conventions or business trips. At the certain point the weeks just began to blur together. What day was it and did it even matter? And even when I would take a day off for mental health, I just thought about all the work I had to do and usually failed at relaxing anyway.

I hung on and hoped something would break my way. But at Flying Lab the content team was at half its original size a year after launch. Some people left the company and others moved over to work on the kids MMOs the company is doing. We also decided to make the missions less cookie cutter by designing each from scratch instead of using templates. The upshot was we had fewer missions designers creating fewer missions and that meant less and less writing for me to do. At the end of the summer the content team and the design team were combined into one team under a new lead. We finished Black Flags and Dread Saints, an eight month serial story line I had conceived, and then started working on an expansion. With the state of the game and nothing else in the offing, there just wasn't enough for me to do. So here we are.

In the short term it's not so bad. I can concentrate on Green Ronin as we launch Dragon Age. I can maybe relax a little and take some weekends off. Health insurance is going to be an issue though and Nicole and I still need to figure out how we can afford to fix the heating system in our house (see her blog for that story). There's also the larger question of where I want to go from here. There are other forms of writing I'd like to explore, such as fiction and comics, that I simply haven't had time to consider the last few years. It may be time for that or something else. I'm sure it's going to make 2010 interesting.

Avast Ye!

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. This is, of course, our favorite holiday at Flying Lab and in fact Pirates of the Burning Sea is the official video game of TLAPD. We've actually put Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket, the holiday's founders, into the game and they have some special missions on them right now. In one you have to teach a parrot to talk like a pirate, which is pretty funny.

http://www.burningsea.com

If you have not played Pirates of the Burning Sea before, now is the perfect opportunity. We've just started offering free trials, so you can play for two weeks without spending a doubloon. It's more fun than dancin' the hempen jig, mateys.

Talk Like a Pirate Day also works for Freeport, of course. If you haven't picked up Buccaneers of Freeport yet, today is the right day. Yar!

Here Comes August

I've been slack about updating the ole blog lately because July has been crazy busy. Nicole and I are leaving for Finland on Monday and we have to tie up all loose ends and make sure everything is on track for Gen Con before we go. In the midst of that Nik and I went to the Portland area over the weekend for her high school reunion and various family visitation. That same weekend Flying Lab moved its offices from Queen Anne to Belltown. The new location cuts about 15 minutes off my commute each way and I can get here on only one bus. I have also escaped the bullpen at last and have a private office I share with one other person that has a lovely view of Puget Sound. Belltown is the north end of downtown and has lots of new options for lunch, which is great. The office is also a 5 minute walk from Singles Going Steady, the best punk record store in Seattle. Woot.

Usually this time of year it's all about Gen Con, but I'm actually more excited about attending Ropecon the week before. Don't get me wrong, I love Gen Con, but this is going to be my 19th in a row and I know what to expect. I will enjoy myself for sure, but it's unlikely to hold any surprises. This will be my first trip to Finland on the other hand and my first con in northern Europe. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Finland and Ropecon have to offer.

On the Gen Con front it looks like GR will (knock on wood) be able to debut the Wild Cards campaign setting for Mutants & Masterminds. This is the first of our George R.R. Martin projects and I think it came out great. Series author John Jos. Miller wrote a hugely comprehensive setting book, Steve made sure it's eminently gameable, and Hal made it look awesome. I think M&M and Wild Cards fans will be very pleased with the finished product. We've got some other Gen Con surprises in the works, but I'm not going to say more until I'm sure they'll make the show.

Now it's back to work. Much to still do before Monday.

27 Years of Galaga Pays Off

I got a promotion today at Flying Lab. I am now the company's Creative Director, in charge of all story elements and narrative design. Up to this point I've basically been isolated in my writing cave. I will now be stepping up into a leadership role at FLS, which I think I am well prepared for after 8 years of running Green Ronin. Now I must tell the crew that floggings will continue until morale improves!

A Sense of Accomplishment

I had to work at Flying Lab both Saturday and Sunday, so I didn't have much of a weekend. I don't mind though because today I wrote my last mission for the Pirates of the Burning Sea launch. Today the game is content complete. Each of the four nations has over thousand missions and I wrote at least a third of those. The format doesn't lend itself to doing easy word counts, but I'd guess I've written at least 200,000 words in the past year. I had a real sense of accomplishment when I submited my final file. I've done work on RPGs, TCGs, minis games, and card games, but this is my first computer game. I'm happy that it's a good one too.

Appropriately enough the pre-order box for Pirates of the Burning Sea should be in stores Tuesday. If you buy it, you get a couple of cool loot items (including a parrot) and you can start playing the game on January 7 instead of January 22 like the rest of the world. My team will be continuing to design new content over the coming months, but that'll be for later updates. The content for the game's debut is signed, sealed, and delivered. Now where's that booty?

Pirates of the Burning Sea Launch Date

The launch date for Pirates of the Burning Sea has been set for January 22. Those of you wondering what I've been working on during the day for the past year can find out in just a few months. Pre-order boxes will be on sale later this month and if you get one you can actually start playing two weeks earlier. John "Cthulhu Built My Hotrod" Tynes, the game's producer, tells you all about it here.

What's the word I'm looking for here? Oh yeah: yaaarrrrr!