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’s. 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’s 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!