John Tynes, producer of Pirates of the Burning Sea from Seattle’s Flying Lab Software, was kind enough to spend a few minutes on the phone recently, chatting about the amazing new massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

BH: So, the water is amazing in Pirates. Without getting too technical, can you explain how it was done? How is that you got the Caribbean to look like a sea instead of a bunch of small patches of water stitched together?

JT: This is really very much a triumph of art direction. Our water isn’t based on physics or fluid dynamics or the principals of water or what have you. I’d love to tell you we modeled the real properties of water, but that’s just not true. The motion is just an animation. The way it looks, reflectively, the gloss was a collaboration between senior programmers and a couple of artists. We had the water looking worse, but then we had them work together through a couple of weeks. The result is, it’s not sophisticated from a technical innovation standpoint. It’s about shaders. Anything that renders light and color detail on daily objects is called a shader, and they developed a wonderful shader. It’s a ship game of course, so from the start we put a lot of work into the water. We were poking at the water and trying different things. The core process took less than a month, and it probably happened about two years ago. The team, they just kind of got fired up.

BH: This was a much different game when you started it five years ago, wasn’t it?
JT: Yes. We set out to make a much simpler, much smaller, much more niche kind of game, something that wasn’t much like a 3-D MM0, wasn’t too sophisticated. It was very primitive, and we (expected we) could find a small audience of fans for it.

BH: What were some of the original features?
JT: It would have had ship combat and trading still but no avatars. It was sort of a stripped down version of the Sid Myers Pirates game.

BH: What happened?
JT: The evolution was helped immensely by the Disney movies. Our passion for the project just grew and grew. We had no expectation that this Johnny Depp thing would be any good, but it set off the latent pirate love that existed in pop culture. And it gave us confidence to build a bigger game.

BH: “Latent pirate love,” I love it. So are you ready for a huge explosion in popularity then? I mean, if you remember, Blizzard had some trouble keeping up with demand not long after launching World of Warcraft.
JT: We actually learned some specific lessons from Blizzard’s
We actually learned some specific lessons from Blizzard's launch. This is back end stuff, but the problems problems they had in getting servers online to handle the load they had were essentially because of their business arrangements. Their server providers couldn't scale that fast. That’s a lesson we learned. We've got that in place. If we need to, say, triple our servers, we can do that. That would be a delightful problem to have.

BH: Do you guys have a WoW killer on your hands?
JT: Well, certainly it is very early to tell, but we in no way have thought it's going to be a WoW killer. We’re not playing in that league. We're happy to play in the AA league. But we’d be delighted if that happened.

BH: Can you talk about content updates and patches?
JT: We have been working toward the first free content update, which should be coming out in March. That's going to include a new capital city for the French nation, Pointe-a-Pitre. That's the capital of France in the Caribbean in the game. It's in the Antilles on the island of Guadeloupe. We’ve created a much bigger capital, and it’s much more beautiful now with more of that classic French architecture. And there will also be new content, new missions, new characters. There will be this whole story line that’s kind of like an Iron Chef cooking quest line where you’ll have to prove your cooking skills to French chefs.

BH: What has been (and what will be) sort of your update philosophy or policy?
JT: The capital city in the pirates portion of the game, Tortuga, is something we replaced just last fall with a new look at what a pirate city should really look like. Capital cites really should be something amazing and fun to look at and fun to be in.
We’re thinking that we should hit players every couple of months with content upgrades.

BH: Any super-secret stuff you can tell us about?
JT: (Laughs) At this time we do not have any other games in development.

BH: How did you grow your team over the duration of development for Pirates?
JT: When I started on the project just over five years ago there were about six of us at Flying Lab. At this point, we're at about 75. It was not a linear expansion. Just in the last couple of years, we ramped up hugely, mostly with hires in art team especially.

BH: Other than that rapid buildup in the last couple of years, what else is unusual about your team?
JT: I'd say the biggest thing that's unusual, and it is kind of a drawback to some extent, is certainly that the overwhelming majority of people at this company had never shipped a game before. That’s especially true of the art and content team. Our art director is a professor and teacher at Art Institute of Seattle. Our art team, with only a couple exceptions are former students of his. He's been cherry picking every graduating class. They start as interns and they are the best and brightest of their class. So while they were new, they were really good.

BH: Regardless of their newness to the games industry, they seem to have helped ship a great game.
JT: Certainly there are companies that have taken the strategy of assembling the all-star team. That may be a great way to go, but we took much more of a ‘we'll build a farm team and grow it’ approach, and it really worked. It would not have worked if we had tried to do it all at once. We grew slowly over time. We kept the staff very small for a long time. That was good because so much of the project was exploratory.