EVE Online's Noah Ward

We've been refining our processes continuously in an attempt to be a lean, mean space game creation machine. At CCP we use Agile methodologies on an enterprise level, and I'm actually finding working in this way to be a real advantage over the old waterfall method. You will need to look up Scrum on Wikipedia or something, because I'm going to use a bit of jargon.

The process starts with a lot of brainstorming. Once we've harvested a fair share of ideas and put them in our backlog we move into scoping. Usually when we do scoping we like to have a theme. The theme of Apocrypha was true exploration. Having that theme makes it easier for us to make hard decisions and have a laser focus on what we're trying to accomplish in the expansion.

The scoping sessions lead to a few key features that float to the top of the backlog which we can build an expansion around. The key features for Apocrypha were unstable wormholes that lead to unexplored space, Tech 3, and Epic Mission Arcs. With those features decided we start to form Scrum teams around those various features.

A standard scrum team for us consists of a Product Owner, Scrum Master, 2 Designers, 2 Programmers and 2 QA, but could be made up of just artists or programmers depending on what they are working on. A key thing that needs to happen at this point is that the Product Owners need to have an intimate understanding of the vision that the Product Managers (that's me) have for the feature they are working on.

That's so important because the real development starts on release planning day. This is a day when the entire company comes together to plan not just what they will work on in their first sprint but in all the sprints leading up to the release. We reconfigure our cantina into a war room with video conferencing to the other offices so everyone has access to everyone, and we're able to rapidly sort out interdependencies.

It works amazingly well compared to the epic fail that would result from me sitting in a room trying to decide who's going to do what and when. After release planning we pull all the product owners into a room at around 10 at night, and decide if the day's plan holds water. If it does then the next day the teams jump right into sprinting, but if it doesn't then we need to release plan the next day. After that, it's two-week sprints, with each team demoing what they have ready at the end of each sprint. Those demos keep the rest of the company abreast of the progress and allow us to iterate over the features based on regular feedback.

Sorry for the TL:DR but I get pretty excited when I talk about this stuff. Even though it took a while to explain, it's really not a complicated process, and I would recommend it to other developers.

There is a lot to be excited about in this expansion. The new system scanner is really cool. It's much more interactive to use, almost like a puzzle game. I've already mentioned the skill queue but it's worth mentioning again because it's so cool. The new fitting screen with picture-in-picture is much improved and includes the ability to save and share fittings. Overview settings are also able to be exported and shared.

The effects have been revamped and look really cool. We've got a new sound engine with new sound effects. Mac users are finally getting Premium graphics and everyone has more options to optimize their graphic performance. I'm personally really excited about this expansion because we've done so many things that I think will please players. There are little things, like the improved agent dialogue, that are just nicer.

Apocrypha is about new challenges, new experiences and giving players added freedom to make their own destiny. Giving players tools to enjoy their time in EVE is what we're all about.

This new W-space should give players a lot of elbow room. EVE isn't over-crowded though; it's just that players all flock to the same places and that's due to game mechanics. We understand this and we're doing things to alleviate these bottleneck systems. The next thing we intend to tackle is the sovereignty mechanics. That should both spread players out in 0.0 and not "force" them to claim as much empty space as they currently feel inclined to do. As we introduce the higher-level Epic Arcs, the players in mission hubs will spread out as well. There is plenty of space out there, it's our job to give the players things to do in it. We're really just getting warmed up.