Hello, my name is Mat Staltman and I am an animator here at Flying Lab Software. In our continuing effort to give you an inside look into the process of making Pirates of the Burning Sea I‘ve been asked to tell you about our emotes and how they get into the game.
Like most of the FLS staff, I play MMO抯. I have played most of them out there and I, like many of you, use emotes a lot when I play them. Emotes are an extension of the smiley; being able to express yourself with actions instead of words can be pretty powerful and a lot of fun :)
I‘ve done some number crunching in order to give you an idea of how important emotes can be in our game. Currently we have 240 animations in the game. Of those 240 animations, 90 of them are emotes ?and this number will grow as we get closer to launch. While emotes are a great way to help people communicate in the game world, it is interesting to note that once we make an emote animation, ConCo is then able to spread them around and make our NPC抯 more lively in the world. If you look closely at the crew members on the ships, you can even see some of the emotes there!
So how do we come up with these emotes and how do we make them? Well, we certainly draw on our experiences with other MMO抯, giving us an idea of what emotes are popular and which ones are most commonly used. Of course common emotes like waving, laughing and dancing made the list, but in our case we are building a pirate game set in the age of sail, so it was important that we added some emotes that fit with our theme. That means regal bows and curtsies, salutes, and of course, the jig. Our list of emotes will continue to grow as we gather feedback from our community.
Now, for the creation of really convincing animations, a point of reference is required. It just isn‘t enough to imagine what a person would look like while taking a bow so we‘ve actually taped ourselves acting out our animations before we create them. Many of the behaviors you see in the crew of a ship are really adaptations taken from video of our staff. Of course, many of you have also heard about Rusty falling down on video (man, did that look painful ?ouch! He really threw himself into the role), and I have a handful of videos at home of myself being hit by cannon fire, etc ?all for the cause of more believable, realistic movement in the game world! Observers will sometimes see me at my desk, acting out emotes while I抦 animating. I have even heard there is a video of Lindsey, one of our animators, doing the jig as well, though I have never seen it (and that‘s the story I‘m sticking with!)
One of the things I like about FLS is our link with the community. We have a great user content system in place (with custom flags and sails) that really allows you to make your mark on the world. I like to think of the emotes as an extension of this as we continue to collect your ideas for them. As many of you know, there is a thread on our forums where you can post what kind of emotes you would like to see in the game. Working with Val, we抳e been able to add over 50 new emotes to the game. While not all emotes will end up being represented by animations, as facial animation won抰 be implemented until after launch, we have been able to create animations for a large number of them and we hope to get most of your suggestions into the gameworld.
I抎 like to give credit to the other great FLS animators who have made animations for the game, folks like Lindsey Krassin, Dustin Haynes, Dennis DeMercer, and Bryan Fu. They‘ve all done excellent work creating realistic movements for avatars, NPC or otherwise.
I‘d like to offer a big thanks to the community for contributing to the emotes thread. Go post more now! Link
See you in the Caribbean,
Mat
Tell News Editor 
