Winner’s Circle
This week’s Flash Game Friday winner is Pirateers! by Labu Games! 
Clearly, this game is all about pirates. You are one of the pirates. The backstory is that you are trying to find “The Neptune’s Eye”, a fabled treasure lost at sea. It seems to be in pieces, and you have to accomplish missions (namely, stealing the pieces from other pirates) in order to get it all put back together again!
There is a lot more to this game than just collecting pieces of the Neptune’s Eye, though. Battling pirates, stealing from merchants, and treasure hunts (when you find maps) fill up the majority of your playing time…all of which lead to more gold so that you can upgrade and better arm your boat for battle!
Pirateers! is an addicting game with great mechanics, game design, polish, and backstory. For any and all of those reasons, it is our Flash Game Friday winner this week- congratulations Labu Games!
Get To Know Labu Games
Tell me about yourself- how many people are on your team? Where are you based?
Let me introduce ourselves, we are a two person team. I am Felix the artist and my friend Heru is the programmer. We’re based in Indonesia, an archipelago country north of Australia. So far, we’ve developed games on Flash, iPhone and Android. We like to try new ideas and always try to innovate with our games.
How long have you been making games? What did you do before?
We’ve been making games as a team since late 2010. Our first game was Wingmen, which was sponsored by Armor Games. Labu Games is almost 2 years old now. Both of us were working in PC casual games development before we decided to join up and started Labu Games.
Heru is an experienced programmer and has mostly been working in the game industry, except for a short period working for an animation feature film studio. Felix is a graphic design graduate with some programming knowledge, and has been working in the game industry for several years.
What was your inspiration for “Pirateers!”?
Lots of games inspired us in Pirateers. The biggest influence comes from Sid Meier Pirates for the naval combat. I also like the sandbox style games (Elder Scrolls / GTA), where players are free to do whatever they want. This led to us providing a variety of activities that the player can perform.
Did you encounter any major challenges or hurdles during development?
Actually yes there were some technical challenges. Heru was working on a separate project, so I had to rely on my noobish programming skills :))
Thankfully there are a lot of libraries that we can tap into nowadays, such as Filxel and Box2d (two libraries that we use on Pirateers ).
What types of games do you like to create the most? What types of games do you like to play the most?
I think we like to create action and puzzle game the most. In fact, these are the only two types of games we have made! Hahaha. I think we’ll need to try some new genres sooner or later. When it comes to gaming, our favorite genres are :
Felix : Action RPG, Fighting, RTS.
Heru : I prefer puzzle and action oriented games.
How long is your game creation cycle? What is your process?
Usually, we take 3 to 5 months to finish a game. First we would just throw game ideas around and if we see potential in it, we’ll start the development. The first step is to build a playable prototype as a proof of concept. Once we’re satisfied with it, we’ll have our friends to test it out and begin art production. This includes designs for sprites, interfaces, etc. When the game is finally in a good shape, we’ll put sound and start another round of playtesting, usually for balancing and adjusting the difficulty curve.
After we refine the gameplay and clean up the bugs found in the playtesting, we polish the game a bit more. We add small details like UI animations, more environment sprites / animations, more sound effects, etc. That’s basically our development process.
Are there any game developers that you admire or consider “rock stars”?
Heru: I admire indie game developers like 2D Boy and Petri Purho. I hope that we can someday reach their level!
Felix: I think all indie developers are great people! The most inspiring one for me is 5th Cell, 2d Boy, and Toge Productions.
What is it about making a new game that you enjoy most?
Felix: I think my favorite part is being able to create a fun and fresh experience for the player.
Heru: What I really enjoy is the creation process itself. Either creating the game mechanic, how the creatures/characters behave, or just figuring out a background story.
Do you have any hot projects you’re working on right now?
We currently have two hot projects! The first one is Stickman Stunt Boat (stuntboat.labugames.com) for iPhone/iPod, which is about to be released in coming weeks. The other one is still in early development so we don’t really have anything to show yet, but it’s going to be awesome!
Best of luck with your current projects, and congratulations again Labu Games!
