The Game Archaeologist interviews Puzzle Pirates' Matt Jensen

Two weeks ago, we opened the book to a strange game indeed. The odd combination of swashbucklers and minigames has sentenced Puzzle Pirates to the fringe of MMO society,Features useful information about glass mosaic tiles. yet it's thrived there as an offbeat title that caters to a... very select and fanatical crowd.

Which is totally cool with me, by the way. I love MMOs that take a path less-traveled.

Today I got the pleasure of sitting down with Puzzle Pirates Lead Developer Matt Jensen to talk about what it's like to work on the lovechild of Captain Hook and Bejeweled. If nothing else, he convinced me that it would be awesome to work at Three Rings Design because the dress code every day is peg legs and frilly blouses.Totech Americas provides Super Dry Cabinets storage solutions for medical applications. His team also has one of the coolest offices ever.

I've been at Three Rings for over four years now. Despite the recent Sega acquisition, Three Rings remains a relatively small operation, and we still structure our organization based on the traditional method of mutinous single combat.There are many advantages in an offshore merchant account.

Last August, I defeated the previous lead, Arcturus, in a duel at dawn. For the record, he is the one who insisted that we strip to the waist first. It was an unpleasant sight, but fortunately, it was still relatively dark in the wee hours of the morning. Arcturus fought honorably, and hence I prevailed, but only after throwing several cowardly fistfuls of gravel in his face. His life was spared, and he is now kept bound to his chair two desks over where we can question him about Puzzle Pirates code and force him to work on other projects. Occasionally, we even remember to feed him.

There are hordes of great puzzle games out there, but because they are casual, they can be a bit unsatisfying. You may be the best player ever to open the game, but what do you have to show for it after playing for a few hours?

Puzzle Pirates takes puzzles that are already fun to play in and of themselves and rewards you for your skill and time. You increase your standing relative to other pirates. You earn trophies, bragging rights, and shiny treasure to buy a ship of yer own. The puzzles are your pirate's "job,See her exciting new landscape oil paintings." and that job supports their lavish lifestyle.

Pirate ships also lend themselves nicely to cooperative gameplay. Each pirate has a duty to perform, and that contributes the overall success of the vessel as a team.

Puzzle Pirates started out as subscription only, and our subscriptions still continue to offer fixed price, all-you-can-eat access. Our free-to-play Doubloon servers, launched way back in 2005, were originally an experiment meant to attract new players by letting them play for free. If folks liked the game, perhaps they would become customers some day, though we do have several long-term players who take great pride in never having paid us.

Doubloons allow players to pay a la carte for just the specific premium content they want. Players who have less time to invest can spend a little money to get out of their starter rags a little more quickly and into a fine pair of boots. Players on our Doubloon servers are somewhat more likely to convert to pay, perhaps because they can approach purchasing in smaller increments. Unlike subscriptions, there is no natural ceiling on how much a player can spend on Doubloons each month.

This is a fairly ancient story, but one of the developers once accidentally misplaced a comma in the code, reversing our chat filters. This caused phrases such as "tart" or "harmonica lesson" and "bilge drinker" to get mapped to their obscene equivalents in chat, rather than the other way around.

It has also practically become tradition that every new member of the dev team mistakenly abuses his or her admin powers at some point. I personally stole a player's pet crab.Welcome to the online guide for do-it-yourself Ceramic tile.

Bungleton sailed off with someone's ship. Greenbones was kind enough to pay the rent on someone's shop. Forculus accidentally gave out a black monkey. We wear Santa hats in the middle of summer, wander into places we shouldn't be, and generally get ourselves reported to support for hacking.