02/20/2008    |    Devlog    |    CoryH    |    Discuss

Big changes are in store for one of the most important ports in Pirates of the Burning Sea. Over the last several months, we’ve been extensively overhauling the center of French power in the Caribbean: Pointe-à-Pitre. The new Pointe-à-Pitre holds a boatload of new missions, NPCs, and unique locations that will make it an attractive destination for all nations and a capital of which French players can be proud. The town’s debut marks the third iteration of a process we started last summer with Port Royal and continued with Tortuga, but it’s the first time we’ve done a capital revamp since the game launched.

Let’s go to Pointe-à-Pitre!

I’m one of two writers dedicated writers (also called “world designers”) working here in ConCo, so naturally I’m eager to talk about all the exciting new content, but then everyone at Flying Lab is stoked to show off the changes in store for Pointe-à-Pitre—even as we hunker down for testing work on the Bey’s Retreat epic mission, hammer out espionage and intrigue in Island Harbour and Basseterre, begin initial planning on the thrilling battle for lost Antillia…and the Admiral is looking at me in that “you should stop talking now” kind of way, so I’ll just stop there.

Tortuga is by far the biggest city in PotBS, but about a year ago, Tortuga looked just like Marsh Harbour, and both were revamped before launch. The British regional capital Port Royal, with its offshore ruins and unique points of interest, was once a dead ringer for the current British starting town, Jenny Bay. And you might have noticed that, at the moment, Pointe-à-Pitre could be Charlesfort’s long-lost twin city. But in ConCo we believe every nation deserves, nay, has the inalienable right, to walk into a unique capital city that is the envy of every other. A city that is, in a word, rocambolesque. A word I never would have learned if we hadn’t revamped Pointe-à-Pitre.

Also, my fellow world designer Chris Pramas’s first suggestion at the initial brainstorming session was, “We could have monkeys that throw things at mimes.” With a pitch like that, who could resist?

Send in the… mimes?

But let me back up. If I’ve learned one thing about revamping a regional capital city in our version of the Caribbean, it’s that thorough and accurate research on the real historical city is always key. That’s why the first thing I did when ConCo got the order to begin work on Pointe-à-Pitre was head straight to Wikipedia, which is never, ever wrong about anything, ever, and most especially not the existence of sextants in 1720. What I found and now share with you, gentle burningsea.com visitor, is the reason ConCo affectionately refers to Pointe-à-Pitre as “Point with Clown,” which is easier to type and doesn’t have that weird little “à” in it. (I hope it’s also the reason Pramas suggested mimes—if it isn’t, then he really is obsessed with them on a level I just don’t want to contemplate.)

Whatever the case, it’s since been edited into the aether (if you will), but check out the entry I found on that first day of Pointe-à-Pitre research, courtesy of Wikipedia’s history archive thingy:

“The town of Point with Clown, was creates by English in 1760. French recovered it later three years! Although rocambolesque, the history of Peter, to the hard life, whereas the etymology of the word, would bring back for the Creole ‘pita’ , or in Spanish, ‘will pitera’, that one finds in South America! Let us let involve itself by this history. an English fisherman, Peter, were accustomed to fishing on a named point, ‘islot with the rats’, in the current of the 17th century. Peter, sold his fish on the point, from where Pointe with Peter, then with the deformation of the French and creole language, Pointe with Clown!

“When the French recovered the place, a borough created thanks to the maritime trade, The essort was important and relatively rapid, partly thanks to the corsairs unfortunately, in 1780, a fire monster entirely destroys the city. Sixty three years later, in 1843, it was again destroyed by an earthquake! The town of Point with Clown, did not have a chance, its history is marked by many fires, 1850, 1871, 1931, the earthquakes of 1851 and 1897, without forgetting the hurricanes of 1865 and 1928! Its population undergoes several epidemics of cholera which led it to the cemetery.”

The town of Point with Clown. “Islot with Rats.” Creole pitas. Perfect. Clearly this hadn’t been taken from another language, hastily translated in Babelfish, and slapped into the article by a well-meaning Wikipedia contributor.

Although rocambolesque…

A few brainstorms meetings later—in which it was determined that although we were go for mimes, we had neither the budget nor the inclination to include a rampaging fire monster, rampaging pita pirates, or rampaging cholera; and further determined that I should perhaps dig a little deeper into the Pointe-à-Pitre’s actual history by opening a real book or two—I took my notes and got to work on a spec document. The spec outlined new locations, NPCs, and missions; some developed and complicated, some a bit simpler.

I already had a rough overhead layout of the city from the fine folks in ArtCo’s environment team, which really helped us visualize the people who would populate the new Pointe-à-Pitre and how they’d interact with the player and each other. It’s that goofy Wikipedia entry that introduced me to the word “rocambolesque,” by the way, which means “Fantastic, incredible, fabulous.” And it was going to be all that from what the artists were showing us. The content had to match, and had to fit the general style of the French nation. It meant passions both noble and suspect, it meant science, it meant knowledge, it meant the culinary, visual, physical, and theatrical arts.

Master Chef Roger Etin

It also meant I got to make use of this wicked hedge maze the artists had in mind. That hedge became the perfect place for the leading man of the town playhouse to woo an ingenue at an inappropriate time. There was room for a vineyard, where players could help a humble winemaker in exchange for valuable consumables…the cooking school could be fairly central, of course, so we’d need a master chef…the warring musketeers would be on opposite sides of town…the Académie Nationale sure could get some use out of that tower when it came to astronomical observations and making some of the New World’s most astonishing historical and natural discoveries… and that empty street corner looks like mime country to me.

So armed, we scheduled the spec review meeting.

At a spec review meeting, everyone working on the project gets together in a big room with the Admiral and other leads with a stake in Pointe-à-Pitre to go over the plan and get everyone’s sign-off. It’s relatively painless, and in addition to sign-off, such meetings invariably net us a few new ideas, either for content or for different ways to achieve what we want to do. Then everyone got to work. Anna Murchison, who had patiently explained exactly what we could and couldn’t do in Pointe-à-Pitre throughout the spec-writing period, would be the lucky duck who’d build the missions, put all the NPCs where they needed to be, and still get to answer my questions about exactly what we could and couldn’t do. The ArtCo environment team went into overdrive, the character team began designing theatrical masks and other avatar pieces, and the animation department started working out exactly how to make a PotBS avatar perform baroque acting gestures and stir cooking pots.

Gothic architecture abounds in the French capital.

And me? I got to answer questions, explain myself, defend the idea of mimes in general and these mimes in particular, pretend to be Molière a little, convince Pramas he really knew more about musketeers than I did, and join Anna in hashing out exactly what the town’s two Académies—Nationale and de Cuisine—wanted and how the players were going to work with them both. Oh, and the missions will probably need text eventually, too.

Oui, mes amis. Things, they were going to change around the town of Point with Clown.

Coming up: Enough with the hinting and the teasing and the, how do you say, “padding of the word count.” Meet new NPCs, locations, and missions in part deux! Also: Dude, where’s my fire monster?

02/20/2008    |    Devlog    |    CoryH    |    Discuss