Fury of the Apocrypha
Yes, it‘s that time of year again. Late evenings around here and the espresso machine has been set to 11, The kitchen staff scrambles to grill what was once pretty herds of happy innocent lambs that ran through the scenic Icelandic landscape, now faceless food for the hungry developers. Constant HD videoconferences between Atlanta, Reykjavik and Shanghai burn up precious bandwidth. The natives are restless. There‘s an expansion on the horizon.
It‘s a special feeling to walk around the offices of CCP Reykjavik these days. Glancing at screens you see new spaceships, mysterious establishments, brand new UI components, and new world maps. In the dark minds of our game developers, they are conjuring up new mechanisms and systems that allow people to cause harm to one and other and to become filthy rich and corrupt from new lucrative industry opportunities. They are also creating places and things that will evoke reactions of wonder and awe as you discover them, far beyond the known universe. Apocrypha is truly a huge evolutionary step for EVE Online. I‘m eagerly looking forward to simply logging on to TQ come March 10th and playing till my eyes bleed and fingers go numb.
To bring you all of this, we at CCP took on an approach that we refer to in-house as "the cauldron." CCP has grown to become a large development house, with offices in Atlanta, Reykjavik and Shanghai. We‘ve working on all sorts of projects, both minor and major.
Signing the deal with ATARI to bring retail boxes of EVE Online into stores on March 12th could not have come at a better time. We were in the process of doing something special - a massive expansion, the most feature rich yet. We had pulled most of our good people out of other projects and task forces to throw them all in a big cauldron called EVE Development and then we stirred like crazy.
From this we‘ve built eleven teams, Scrum teams to be exact, each of which is self sufficient, has their own game designers, artists, QA people, programmers and producers. These teams are capable of tackling entire features on their own, operating like small commando units behind enemy lines, while working with the bigger group on strategy, dealing with inter-dependencies and developing optimal communication processes.
In the coming weeks, each of these teams will be writing a couple of blogs on their features and how they are developed. We hope that you will enjoy learning about them and we also look forward to seeing the feedback and discussions that will arise. Yes, all of the discussions, even the emo rage.
