Pirates Ho!

May 13, 2000

We have added an Images page that includes photos of some of our concept art as well as preliminary versions of the artwork that will be used in the game.

April 23, 2000

Okay, so much for our weekly updates! Although we've been a little lax about updating the site, we have been working hard on other stuff the last couple of months. We have several new images ready, which will be available sometime within the next week. Our third article on the developemnt of "Pirates Ho!" is available through IBM DeveloperWorks. This article focuses on the story development and graphic design of the game. The first article in the series, "Using SDL: The Birth of 'Pirates Ho!'" is also available through the DeveloperWorks archive, for anyone who missed it the first time around :-)
We have a few other goodies for you, which should be available during the next week or so. Thanks for being patient - we promise not to take as long with our updates in the future!

February 10, 2000

The major project for this week has been working up a draft version of the plotlines for our opening scenario and introductory mission. We wrote up each scene in HTML format because that's a lot easier than trying to keep track of a zillion pieces of paper with questionably legible notes on them.

February 1, 2000

     Pirates Ho! is still in the very first stages of development. So far we have constructed a map of the game world and ironed out a lot of the story lines. We have some pretty good ideas about how the combat and roleplaying systems will work, and we're working on modeling ships, people, monsters & land/seascapes.
     Most of the development up to this point has been limited to the realm of graphic design, and we've been using primarily Bryce4 and Painter 4, although for modeling people & creatures we plan to give Poser a try. As soon as we get a little further along and actually start coding, we will be relying heavily on the Simple DirectMedia Layer Library (SDL). SDL is a cross-platform game development library that currently supports Linux, Win32 and BeOS.
     The rules for combat, character development and role-playing will most likely be loosely based on a collection of non-computer games and game systems including GURPS and some other RPG's, and a board game called Broadsides and Boarding Parties.