BattleClinic sat down with Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, CTO and Gabe Mahoney, VP Engineering for CCP at the Game Developer's Conference and pummeled them with questions. (don't forget, we sell
timecodes!)
BattleClinic:Congratulations on a fantastic release in Apocrypha. What are you most proud of?
Halldór:For me, Apocrypha is a holistic package. Everything is tied together in this concept of going into a wormhole. This is quite an achievement; in the past, we had a laundry list of features and directions, and did A, B, and C. But there wasn't any connection. That's what's so cool about Apocrypha -- we're introducing new space, and in that new space, well, there are resources to exploit, and they interrelate. I feel like it's struck a cord with the older population of EVE players. They feel like this is EVE at the core. Look, if you go into wormhole space and you haven't done your homework, you'll get screwed up.
Gabe:Exactly! I've been a player for 5 years, but I haven't been playing because I've been working so hard to bring each release to life. When Apocrypha was released, I sat down and immediately put 20 hours in; 10 hours on Saturday and 10 on Sunday. I got lost in a wormhole and came up in a completely different part of 0.0. As an old player, it really reinvigorated me.
Halldór:We're even seeing this excitement in the office. Our artists worked so hard on this expansion, and made this entirely new class of spaceships--it was just an amazing amount of work. As soon as they were done, they jumped back into playing the game and seeing what wormholes were about, what new strategies would work.
Gabe:I'm really proud of what we've done because--and I don't know if people outside CCP realize this--but it's the first time that all three CCP campuses contributed to one release. Normally we do it out of Reykjavik, but this time we had Reykjavik, Atlanta, and Shanghai. It was an entire CCP development effort. AND, we put out the biggest expansion we've ever had--in the shortest time we've ever done it. It was everyone working collaboratively and efficiently. It was a lot of work putting everything in place and managing it, but once we had the basic framework, CCP rose up. It was like Voltron. We morphed into this awesome robot of creativity...
BattleClinic:...and the robot was blonde?...
Halldór:Yeah and it had a giant axe...
Gabe:The sum was greater than the parts. We could not have done it without the awesome effort of every single person at CCP. We're so proud of our folks, it just amazes us what they bring to the table to make a great game.
Halldór:And to organize all this, we used
SCRUM. During our sprint reviews every two weeks, each campus would report what they had accomplished. And every two weeks, the senior manager's jaws would just drop, because of what each team had managed to accomplish. We would look at each other and ask, how did it go from X to Y in just two weeks? We were amazed--and it just kept happening.
Gabe:And each team was was responsible for a feature. So what was cool was, for example, we'd have Shanghai in the morning present to Reykjavik, and they'd say here's what we did, here's what we didn't get done, here's what's planned. We videotaped everything for CCP people who couldn't make the meetings, so they knew what was going on. It really brought the various teams together and totally amazed us at what we as a company can do.
Halldór:What's also great is that, as part of SCRUM, you integrate other disciplines. So we had artists there, designers, and quality assurance to name a few. It was amazing having them there; we feel that this team effort led to much, much fewer bugs, and we were able to crush them faster, over two weeks. And there was less resurgency of bugs, which is obviously good for the players.
Gabe:We did have some issues on release, and we reacted to them quickly. But for the scale and complexity of what we were doing, we were pleased that we released a high quality experience.
BattleClinic:There were a lot of moving parts to this release.
Gabe:Yeah, and congratulations to our Ops team -- this was the shortest downtime for a release this size. We planned on 24 hours and they did it in 12.
BattleClinic:And we're sure the players appreciate less downtime. Looking at the whole release, what's your one favorite feature?
Halldór:Tech 3 ships!
Gabe: Wormholes! But you can't have one without the other. It's one package!
Halldór:Yeah, but I like the Tech 3 ships. The artists are really starting to dig into the new graphics technology. I gave a presentation here at GDC about this. It's really interesting to see how the artists have evolved their skills over the years. Looking back for instance at the Trinity expansion, a lot of that stuff looked great--but compared to the T3 ships now? Wow. The artists have really embraced the graphics engine, and the results are stunning. We have to keep in mind that we, the engineers, can keep tweaking the game engine, but the result is never going to be better than the artists that are creating inside of it. Giving them time to work with the tools has allowed them to bring us incredible results.
Gabe:Ok I love wormholes. They unlock emergent gameplay. It's what makes EVE great -- the idea that you can discover and exploit the resources, and we're not going to tell you what happens there. We open up a bunch of new spaces that inspire curiosity and discovery, even for high-sec players. Now all of a sudden they pop out of another wormhole deep in 0.0 and they've got to make a run back. The uncertainty, the inability to predict what's going to happen, and the thrill that goes with all of that--well, to me that's what makes EVE an amazing game.
Halldór:I also really like the new fitting screen, and having the 3D view in there. But I really liked it from a technical standpoint because we did a lot of heavy lifting inside the engine. It was something we had put on the roadmap a long time ago, and I had written up a technical document. The game designers came over and told us they really liked the idea, and was it possible. We said, yeah, it just so happens that it can happen--so it did. It just so happens that we're seeing a bright future for some of the offshoots of the work we did here. It hasn't been released in a patch yet, but we will have a window where you can spin the 3D ship model around, scale it up or down, etc. What's cool is you'll be able to go into the item browser and look a a ship, spin it around, and check it out in detail. Which frankly I think is awesome because there's so much artwork that players may never have seen. Soon it will be open to you as the player to see in really fine detail. I go all over the world and talk about random stuff, and I use pictures of a few models that I personally really like, and players will approach me afterward and ask me where they can see all that detail. I really like the
infested Domi -- it's all creepy with the tentacles -- love it.
Gabe:The other feature that we haven't seen a ton of yet is the Epic mission arcs...and they're huge! But what people may not realize is that we put a huge investment into the toolset that allows players to build these. So what you're getting in Apocrypha and future updates are graphical tools that will allow content developers to build fun, immersive and complex stories easily. It will be easy--drag and drop--and although you haven't seen a lot of it yet, it will just amaze you at how easily it's going to be create these fascinating story lines.
BattleClinic:We've got so many questions from our members that we won't be able to fit everything in, but let's talk about the other big initiatives that have been advertised but not yet delivered: Atmospheric flight, walking in stations, the final and complete death of lag, and better API support for apps like EVEMon, Griefwatch and EVE-Dev boards, and BattleClinic's loadouts, etc.
Gabe:Well I gotta say I love EVEMon, it's a great app. But let's take walking in stations. We've got a team working on it and we think it will really open up EVE. The thing is, it's a whole new set of technologies that we have to ensure works with the server. It's a priority, but it takes time and we don't want to release it until it's ready.
Halldór:Let's talk about lag. Our fortunate problem is that EVE just keeps growing. The simple fact is that with more players, we are getting bigger battles. We've put out some significant client updates that allow us to have even larger fleet battles. We're focusing on that, which does slow us down when it comes to building walking in stations.
Gabe:Yeah, we are continuing to work on the challenge of reducing lag. We put Kristján V. on stackless IO and it was a big lag killer last year, and we're partnering him up with a team directly after he gets back from PyCon
http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/talks. He's going to go into a performance sprint where he's got some further ideas on how to optimize the game. EVE-Online just hit another huge peak in subscribers recently, and as Halldór said, the more people come in, the more want to congregate and shoot each other in the face. What's funny is that as soon as we put stackless IO out there, it allowed fleet fights to get to 1400 people. And of course, EVE players being who they are, they tried to cram 1500 people into a fight. We would love to get it to a point where every single player in EVE can be in once system fighting--and I guess then we can quit!
Halldór:Maybe we need hall monitors in systems!
Gabe:It's pushing the bar for us, and we're continuing to respond. Lag is something we're continuing to fight and hey, we're optimizing our code at the same time, so it's absolutely a worthwhile investment to make.
BattleClinic:At BattleClinic, we work hard to help both vets and new players fight smart. Anything on the list to help new players ramp up faster, but avoid upsetting those players that have put their time in?
Gabe:One of the things we're toying with is extending the new player experience both directions in time; basically, giving our New Player Experience team the objective of thinking about the entire process, from the time they see a banner ad on BattleClinic to the time they join their first corp. It's all integrated and it's all smooth. Right now, as great as our process is now--download the client, create a character, play the game--we still have a lot of room to grow. We're thinking about what happens during downloading and installing and how we can make that time valuable to a player.
BattleClinic:Any other thoughts?
Gabe:Keep playing EVE!
Halldór:For me, coming from a background of working on console games (my last gig was working on Sims 2 for console), what's really cool about EVE is this: Working on Sims 2, I would meet people and they would say, 'oh my daughter plays Sims 2.' Now, working on EVE, they say, '
I play EVE.' EVE is a game for anybody, and it can appeal to anybody, but I like it because so many of our players are grown ups. They have a good eductation, they are smart, they have their heads in the right place and they have passion and great ideas, and that's what's so cool about working on it. It's awesome to be around.
BattleClinic:Thanks very much.
