Here Be Puzzle Pirate Adventures

The big news in this release is the addition of Puzzle Pirate Adventures to the game.

As alluded to in Captain Cleaver's recent forum post, perhaps the most exciting part of Adventures is not what it includes now, which is essentially an easier way for new players to get access to the game, but what it has the potential to be in the future.

Saying that, it's perhaps worth reviewing what was added, as it represents some fairly impressive changes to the game. These include:

• The ability to play the game in a browser, getting the elements from the game that are needed "on the fly". This changes getting the game from a 45 megabyte endeavor to something like 3 megabytes of waiting time for the new player. Blood has been spilled to achieve things less challenging.
• The basic concept of narrative: The game now includes the ability to create gates and challenges that must be completed before a pirate can continue.
• A system for playing the adventures that allows pirates to grow to teams of four without disrupting play. In addition to thinking a great deal about how this would work with NPP swabbies, it also obliged the dev. team to work out how best to create and manage invitations, both for existing and potentially new Puzzle Pirate players

Great achievements, each one! Everyone on the development team deserves a (second) pirate hat. Maybe even a monkey.

Rolled together, these additions allow us to create things that have much more narrative content than is present in the game itself. There are risks associated with this. A crew of industrious pirates will always be able to outstrip our ability to create new content that's fun to play. And, perhaps more important, it is generally more fun to pit one's wits against real people rather than challenges we might think up. We don't for a second believe that Adventures will create an alternative to pillaging. In the long run, this inclines us to believe:

• The "library" of Puzzle Pirate Adventures will be engaging and fun for players looking for adventure for a specific period of time and, particularly, to collect the trophies and other items from all of the adventures.
• In the medium term, it is likely that we will want to be able to included as broad an array of ideas and narratives as we can in the Adventures that are available to players.
• In the longer term, Adventures will need to have relevancy to the vibrant and changing environment in the downloaded game. There are a number of ways we can achieve this, many of which are still under consideration here. While no decisions have yet been made, it's clear that Adventures will need to be complementary to the important pillaging/voyaging aspect of the game.

These points are, of course, all highly speculative and open to interpretation. This is intended. We still hove to our general policy of encouraging rampant speculation and paroxysm of pirate-related excitement. Check back later for more!