Gamertell

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. I always wanted to find a pirate game I would love to play but never found one that would be intuitive enough for me to play. Therefore I have started working on this idea of a new pirate game that would the interface of a strategy PC game like Age of Empire. 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, “[O]ur 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 added that this approach to creating the web-based game allowed his team to offer a game that can not only evolve but can be produced very quickly and players can play without the worry of constant downloading of content just to play a level.

“As you may know, the game is 100% web-based and players can play from their laptop, from work, from a friend’s computer (or) from a cyber cafe. They don’t need to install anything. However we are very limited by the bandwidth and we cannot send tons of images,” he explained. “Therefore we have been using a cutting edge technology used mainly on Web 2.0 websites where the user does only load the images of the page that are needed. The page doesn’t have to refresh completely and we save a lot of bandwidth to be able to send more graphics than before. This also gives a much better interactivity of the game and makes it look more of a PC strategy game.”

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.

“We have introduced hookers that are essential in order to generate gold and even to keep your crew happy. Your pirate’s and slave’s happiness is based on weapons, rum and tobacco. Also priests are used to to rescue your wounded pirates in battles but need rum to be happy,” Belrhiti said. “So these are features of the game that make it unique and thrilling compared to other pirate games. For a game almost solely based around one screen, Piracy Age is still a very strategical game, which requires careful planning and consideration, or else your pirate empire could soon be lost. The most important part about the game that is very important is the game community.This is a game of strategy and players cannot get to the top by themself, they need be part of a crew or create their own crew.

“Players take on the role of a pirate with their own private island, which they can use however they see fit to come out on top as the wealthiest player in the game. Whether you buy your way to the top or work your way there through careful strategies, everyone will eventually have the chance at being the grand prize winner.”

The game is free and has no time limit for how long players choose to play. Registration is quick and easy. Once registered you can pick an island and start raiding the high seas to make a name for yourself. The transactions and events happen smoothly because the page doesn’t have to constantly refresh every time a change is made. But players who enjoy the game have an option to buy subscriptions or credit packages (PayPal, Via or Mastercard).

Belrhiti said his company listens to the players and will continue to evolve the game according to the needs of the games community including interaction through the company’s Facebook page

“We are 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.”

Site [Piracy Age] Site [Mafia Boss]