Anyway, Max Hoberman, the President of Certain Affinity and the developer of Age of Booty, wanted to give you some insights into this critically acclaimed game. He’ll also answer any questions you have about the game. Without further ado, heeeere’s Max!

This is a follow-up to my previous post, where I described the genesis of our upcoming downloadable pirate action RTS, Age of Booty. I left off with us signing a publishing deal with Capcom and beginning production. That was a year ago, and since then we’ve had a lot of time to improve upon the original design.

At this point you might be wondering what exactly Age of Booty is all about. In my last post I touched on the game’s unique combination of simple, intuitive controls and mechanics and strategic depth. But that was all pretty high-level, so let’s dive a bit deeper.

In Age of Booty you are the captain of a pirate ship, a representative of one of several pirate factions. These factions are fighting it out for control of the hexagonal seas. Yes, that’s right, the environments in Age of Booty are constructed of three dimensional … hexagons. This harkens back to the game’s early board game influences and early tile-based computer game influences. There’s beautiful simplicity in a world built of tiles. For starters, levels are incredibly easy to create and to tune, both for the game designer and for the player. (Yes, Age of Booty comes with a map editor.) Tiles clearly defined in the game world are also great for strategic planning, and so toward this end each unit in Age of Booty occupies exactly one hex. This holds true for ships and towns, a decision that created some interesting artistic challenges and that contributed to the game’s stylized graphics.

Unlike other strategy games you control just one ship in Age of Booty. I know, a strategy game with just one unit seems pretty odd. It actually works amazingly well. The camera is decoupled from your ship, so you find yourself constantly scanning the map. An overhead map is available but it doesn’t show enemy ship locations, and so this “scouting,” or spying on your opponents if you like, is integral to the game. At any given time you’re controlling your camera, controlling your ship’s movement, and managing your upgrades, resources, and infrastructure. Until you’ve played the game you won’t appreciate how much is really going on. Of course the game play movies that people have seen on the web don’t do the game justice unless you know what it is you’re looking at—you’d be better off just watching the emotions on someone’s face while they’re playing!

Alright, so you control a ship on a tile-based playing field. But to what end? While the core mechanics lend themselves to numerous game objectives, in order to focus our efforts we settled on just one for the shipping game: town control. This is most similar to territories games, if you’ve played them. Each map has a set number of towns, all of which start out neutral. When you take over a town it raises your faction’s flag. The first team to control a specific number of towns wins the game. Typical maps have between about three and eight towns, with control of two-thirds of these towns usually required to win a game. This number is set on a per-map basis, however, so a map might require control of all towns, just one town, etc.

There are layers upon layers of depth built upon this foundation. For example, if a town is adjacent to resource hexes it starts producing these resources for you when you take control of it—gold, wood, or rum, to be precise (what else?!). Resources can be used to upgrade your town defenses and also to upgrade your ship’s speed, armor, and cannons. Even though games last between just five and fifteen minutes it’s extremely rare that a team wins without upgrades, and so collecting resources becomes a constant objective underlying your ultimate goal. Sure, taking control of towns doesn’t sound too complicated, but keep in mind that there’s one or more other teams trying to do the exact same thing, upgrading their offensive and defensive capabilities along the way, and trying to pick off your newly acquired towns, which are weaker than neutral towns, and you start to see where some of the depth comes from.

There’s one more aspect of the game I want to discuss. Sharing might not be for pirates, but one of the key elements to Age of Booty is team play. Whether you’re playing the single player game or multiplayer you almost certainly have one or more teammates. These can be computer controlled players such as Pegleg Pete, your sidekick in the single player game, or friends—Age of Booty supports up to four players on a single console and up to eight networked. As soon as you have even just a single teammate new strategic opportunities arise.

For example, right off the bat teams have to decide how to distribute ship upgrades. Most maps give you enough resources for two to three upgrades at the start. Is it better to split the upgrades evenly? Or perhaps to load one player up with guns and armor (become a “tank”, as we say) while the other stays fast but weak? If you both upgrade you’ll present a powerful pair when you’re together, but if you split up you’ll likely be overwhelmed by enemy tanks; nor will either one of you be quite as fast as the un-upgraded player, causing you to lose the race for resource pickups. On the other hand, if you take all of the upgrades you’ll move fairly slowly, while your teammate will be too weak to take neutral towns without assistance. There’s no right answer, and a lot depends on the particular map and your strategy and ability to coordinate.

This array of possibilities only grows as you add a third and even a fourth team member, and sometimes a third (or more) team, each with its own strategy and agenda. And that’s just at the start of the game; as you earn more resources you’ll be faced with similar strategic decisions. For instance, if one team member has taken all of the upgrades at the start do you let him or her continue taking future upgrades or do the weaker players start to upgrade?

I could go on and on describing the strategic intricacies of the game, but I’ll leave the rest for you to discover—the subtle advantages and disadvantages of various ship upgrade types, the strategic use of Curses, pilfering native villages, the importance of positioning in combat, and so on. I’ll be around to answer questions and provide more detail on the game, so join in the discussion!

This is John D again. What are you waiting for? Go download the game. I’ll be back soon to talk about SFHD Remix and Flock! Till next time. Yarrrr!

Here are more details:

• Release date: Soon (I’ll confirm when I get a solid date)
• Price: Only $9.99!
• Trophies: No comment at this time. ;)
• Add on content: Lots of free map packs in the future plus some cool expansions.
• Players: Up to 8 players online – You can play a 4 player local match then take the team online!
• Demo:Available a couple weeks after launch with online multiplayer matches!

Max Hoberman, one of the founders of the company that developed the game, has been kind enough to write this message to you, the PlayStation fans, and answer some of your questions (This is his time, so I probably won’t answer your Capcom related questions for a couple days). Anyway, heeeeeeere’s Max!

Hi everyone. My name is Max Hoberman. I’m the President and co-founder of Certain Affinity, developer of the upcoming downloadable pirate action RTS, Age of Booty. I thought I’d share a little bit of history about how Certain Affinity came about and the beginnings of the game.

Prior to starting Certain Affinity I worked at Bungie, where I was responsible for the multiplayer portion of the Halo games. In Austin I met a few amazingly experienced and talented developers, ironically from the Digital Anvil studio Microsoft had just closed. I was still working remotely for Bungie, and so I had to make a choice: continue working remotely or leave and start something new. I chose the latter and thus Certain Affinity was born.

Skip forward a few months. We’d been working on an ambitious long-term project but didn’t believe we’d be able to sign it quickly, at least not on favorable terms, and so we started looking for more work for hire. We had a few people free, and so while we looked we built a prototype of a game that would later come to be known as Age of Booty.

A bit earlier I’d had the idea of basing a console game off of the Settlers of Catan board game. I’m a huge fan of this game due to its balance of simple mechanics and depth, and also due to its replayability, something I attribute to its random maps. A friend, Stefan Sinclair (now one of our programmers), and I spent a day brainstorming about how to apply some of these mechanics to a console game. Inspired by Bungie’s long-running Pimps at Sea joke we started with the idea of playing as a pirate, we borrowed ideas from Catan, like a hex-based environment and resource production. But we also changed a lot to better suit an action game. We ditched turn-based play, for instance, decided that movement would happen from hex to hex rather than along hex boundaries, determined that each player would control a single ship, etc.

The team at Certain Affinity gave this design document a cautious welcome. David Bowman, one of our design leads, immediately took to it, going so far as building a paper prototype to sort out the core game mechanics. Paul Isaac and Peter Carter, our programmers, were more skeptical but dove in nonetheless, building the 3D hex-based environment and establishing core mechanics like camera and ship control, movement, and combat. We threw a lot at the project, and in six weeks flat we had a networked, playable prototype that looked good and that was a ton of fun. We realized that we’d discovered something wonderful.

Strategy games don’t typically mix well with consoles due to their complex PC-based controls. Yet Catan and many board games like it are strategy games to their core, though with wildly different mechanics and, due to their physical nature, usually less complexity. We ended up with a unique, highly intuitive control scheme and very simple mechanics, in ways more reminiscent of a board game than a PC strategy game. We then wrapped this in the trappings of computer-based strategy games—made it real-time, added team play, configurable options, a map editor, etc.

We played this ourselves a bunch, and then showed it around, first to friends and then, cautiously, to publishers. Everyone seemed to get it almost without explanation. It took just one game to get someone yelling and screaming and having a hell of a good time. We eventually signed a publishing deal with Capcom, a company that takes downloadable games and quality as seriously as we do. Now, a little over a year later, the game is about to go live.

Anyway, there’s a bit of info about the genesis of the game. I’ll follow this up with a bit more on the game itself, what it looks like in final form and why we’re so excited about it. Talk to you soon!