I've been long-aware that the modern web has officially abandoned Flash support, and a couple of Sky Pirate Arcade's titles have been unplayable as a result. It wasn't until I was recently whipping the site into shape, however, that I realized what a tragedy that is. Our fanbase only has so many fan games to play—we can't just let them die!

One of those games was Gesellschaft Galley, which has now been recreated using Unity, and is playable in-browser once again! But since this game was already being built from the ground up, I thought why not do it up right? The original Galley was fun, but definitely a quick whip-up, pretty bare-bones. While the simple gameplay has been emulated with care to ensure that existing scores on the leaderboard will mix flawlessly with new ones, you can see that v2.0 has been super-upgraded with full 3D graphics.



Of course with a graphical upgrade came complications. MAJOR appreciation to Blyka for stepping in and making it possible to conclude this project in a reasonable amount of time.

Click on through and give it a play! It takes literally less than a minute!

You may have noticed things look a little different around here. I recently had to upgrade the PHP version on my web hosting, and there were a few broken items that needed fixing. Sky Pirate Arcade in particular required heavy work to get the leaderboards back online. While I was in the midst of that work, it got me looking closely at the site for the first time in a long time. I couldn't help notice how dated it felt, and though the layout had held on remarkably well for its age (going on 15 years, if you can believe it), there were places where it was breaking a bit. It seemed a good time for a makeover.

I didn't have any great vision for a new design, so I thought I'd stick with the red and gray but lean more into the legit shades of the Drache, since it's such an iconic part of the site's history. And of course along with a whole new layout came some cleanup of the content, some of which was highly out of date.

Honestly, Sky Pirate Arcade doesn't get much action these days, so maybe this was all a waste in terms of anyone caring. But even if it's the fate of this site to sit untouched for the rest of its days, at least it can now do so with a little more style.