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Where to begin... A Pirate's Legend was a love / hate game. It was a game I decided to make while trying to chase the money instead of maybe what I wanted to do. Luck Charm had done well, and there was only one pirate movie out when I started development. I thought it was a sure fire way to score some extra dough and reuse allot of the code I had written for Luck Charm, while getting to add cool things I didn't really have time for in Luck Charm.
A Pirate's Legend actually shipped! Well, sort of shipped. Big Fish, Reflexive, Oberon and a few others picked it up. However, Real declined it and that was a big blow as Real was responsible for 60% of the money I saw from Luck Charm Deluxe. Still I had high hopes and the game was easily twice as "solid" as Luck Charm Deluxe.Mini - Games were a great addition I thought as well as the Achievements. The were great 10 minute goal additions to the game that I thought for sure would set it apart from similar games at the time. I also added the Pirate Frenzy mode, which was a great mini-game inside of the actual game when you could raise your jolly roger flag up by making matches of four or more. (similar to the rainbow in Luck Charm, or the Tiki Totem in Big Kahuna Reef by Reflexive Entertainment). The Map screen turned out ultra sweet, way better than I expected. I know that sounds silly but I do struggle with showing levels and progression in some sort of meaningful way. I was also pleased with the addition of the "bomb" powerup which allowed the player to "Reset" a piece in the game to allow them to get those pesky tough matches. Overall the features of the game that were added were directly related to what I felt the shortcomings of Luck Charm Deluxe were.
Voice overs. It would seem I am a much better leprechaun than I am a pirate! That being said it was still fun, and I don't think I would have taken them out, or skipped them in hind-site. However, they aren't wonderful.EIGHT MONTH DEV CYCLE ON A REMAKE! Considering I got to reuse a ton of code, eight months seemed very long. Considering Luck Charm was about three from start to finish. This is partly do to lack of motivation on my part. It's hard to remake what you just finished. It sounds easy to just "reskin" it and get it out there before the next person does. It sure wasn't. I found myself really frustrated with the look of the game since I started to bring in rendered elements. I realized it needed to be all rendered or all vector, and in the end most of the dev time was spent doing art pieces. I think the final product was good, but it sure doesn't seem like eight months worth of work to me. 2345138475123745231475897345 other pirate games ship in the two weeks before I go to beta. ARE YOU KIDDING??!??!? Talk about crap timing... By the time the game got "out" I think I was sandwiched between A Pirate's Caribbean Adventure, and Captain Morgan's online frenzy. Trying to cash in on a movie license was a horrible idea... did I say horrible? I meant utterly horrendous.
I wish I had the eight months of my life back. That sounds harsh, but it was too long to be working on a game for one person. It is just to difficult to keep myself motivated on things I don't want to work on no matter how much I think I will make. It's not about money and A Pirate's Legend really shoved that into my consciousness. Still, I love pirates, and I do enjoy the game. I am proud of it and I still boot it up every once in a while to marvel at the amount of things nobody will every see!
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