Two days ago I put three free pirate games on reefrunner.us. Since then every one of them has been repainted, and they finally have a name to sail under: Plunder Bay Entertainment.

The Plunder Bay Entertainment logo: a grinning pirate skull in a black tricorn hat and red bandana over a ship's wheel and two crossed flintlock pistols, with PLUNDER BAY in gold letters, ENTERTAINMENT on a blue ribbon and a compass rose below
The new flag over the harbour.

Why repaint

The games played well, and the people who tried them said so. But the art was mostly drawn in code: flat shapes, simple outlines, the look of a prototype. Cloud Dancer’s airship was the exception. It came from the painted app icon, and next to it everything else looked unfinished. So the rest of the fleet got the same treatment.

Cloud Dancer

Every enemy, boss, coin, chest and gun crate is now hand-painted art in the same style as the airship: brass-banded zeppelins, gyrocopters with glass cockpits, balloon mines, flak towers on rocky islets, and four bosses. The moving parts are still animated over the paintings: rotors spin, gun turrets swivel, the Tempest Engine’s lightning crackles, and the Brass Kraken’s clockwork tentacles sway under its riveted dome.

Cloud Dancer before and after. Before: a flat cartoon airship and a plain grey zeppelin over a simple sea. After: the painted pirate airship firing at HMS Thunderer, a detailed brass-banded navy zeppelin with a red war stripe, over a painted sea with soft clouds
HMS Thunderer, before and after.

The repaint came with bigger rewards, too: more gold, treasure chests, prizes that fly to you, and a Sky Market full of upgrades like exploding shells, a five-ball broadside and a wingman gyrocopter.

Jolly Rogue

Jolly Rogue is a pixel-art game, and the pixel pirates stay; they have far too many frames of running, jumping and shooting to repaint. What changed is the world behind them. Each of the four levels now has a painted backdrop: a tropical island at golden hour, a sunset sea full of merchant ships, a lantern-lit cargo hold and a candlelit gun deck.

Jolly Rogue before and after. Before: the pixel pirate running on grassy platforms in front of a pale beige sky with simple pixel palm trees. After: the same pixel pirate and platforms in front of a painted tropical bay with mountains, palm trees and a pirate ship at anchor
Palm Tree Island: same pirate, new world.

Reef Runner

The first game kept its bright, sunny feel, but everything on the water is painted now: your sloop, the British frigates, the Spanish galleons, HMS Invincible, the sandbars, the storm clouds, the chests and the rum barrels.

Reef Runner before and after, on a phone. Before: a flat cartoon pirate ship facing a flat cartoon man-o'-war firing a wall of cannonballs. After: a painted pirate sloop and a detailed painted three-masted HMS Invincible firing the same wall of shot
HMS Invincible's broadside, before and after.

How it was made

I wrote detailed prompts for every enemy, boss and backdrop and generated the art in ChatGPT, a whole sheet of objects at a time on a plain background. Then Claude cut each object out, sized it to match the game’s hit boxes, flipped the ships that came out facing the wrong way, and wired it in, so the art is new but the games still play exactly the same.

The Cloud Dancer art sheet: thirteen painted objects on a plain grey background, including a navy gyrocopter, a zeppelin, a balloon mine, a flak tower, a sky pike, a cloud lurker, HMS Thunderer, the Tempest Engine, Fort Sovereign, the Brass Kraken, a gold coin, a treasure chest and a parachuting gun crate
One art sheet became Cloud Dancer's whole navy.

A new harbour

reefrunner.us got the same care: the Plunder Bay logo now sits over a painted harbour on the front page, and every game page has fresh screenshots.

The reefrunner.us front page: the Plunder Bay Entertainment logo and the headline Three free pirate games over a painted harbour with a tall sailing ship, rocky cliffs and a treasure chest, with the Reef Runner, Jolly Rogue and Cloud Dancer logos along the bottom
The front page of Plunder Bay.

All three games are still free, still play in your browser on phones and computers, and still have no ads, no accounts and no tracking. They work with a game controller now too. The iPhone, iPad and Android apps are on their way to the app stores.

Where to play