| Now living the swashbuckler’s life is only a click away on the web.
I recently sat down and spoke with the managing director of Inova Interactive, Larbi Belrhiti about his game Piracy Age. Piracy Age is a massive multiplayer online game where players take on the role of a pirate, manage a crew and, according to the site, “reach absolute notoriety and fear on the seas, and use the means of terror and force to achieve it.”
Piracy Age was released this month (March 2009) and joins Inova Interactive’s first MMO game Mafia Boss which yielded 1.3 million registered players and paved the way for other games since its release in 2005.
“Even though the game was a success story, we have been working hard since 2006 to make a step forward in this niche of MMO browser-based games,” Belrhiti explained. “In the company, I am the person in charge of creating the game concepts. It took us three years to get Piracy Age ready; however, Piracy Age is just like the top of the iceberg. We have actually been thinking of building a gaming network and wanted to find a way to offer many games for players to play on the same website, with one account.”
Belrhiti said it took so long to create the game because “it took us one year to build a gaming platform that would be able to hold many games.”
To help cut down development time, as Belrhiti explains, “Our technical team came up with a ingenious approach to build a game generator. We would actually put the game concept in files, put the creatives, images and skinning in a directory and give everything to the game generator. The game generator will then generate a game automatically. This game generator took us 2 years of heavy engineering to get done. So as you might be asking yourself, Piracy Age is 100% generated and was not hard coded.”
Belrhiti said the second challenge of creating Piracy Age, was avoid a childish looking game that players would not want to participate in for competitions. So the game has very mature themed activities and characters that make up the player’s crew.
Piracy Age is a company that is very close to our players. We listen to our players suggestions and keep improving the gameplay and proposing new features,” he explained. “In three years, I would say that the game will be as attractive and as easy to play for everybody but with the greatest player community. I think that we all played games with a strong passion 10-15 years ago, maybe they were not as evolved as today’s (online games) but we have been so passionate. This is how I see our games, not industrial games but games with a strong human and social aspect. |
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