Beitrag von: Aura am Juni 29, 2013, 05:02:21 Nachmittag
I became interested in a possible interview after seeing him on one of the pre-Odyssey CCP dev streams on Twitch TV. He was sitting there, on the comfy couch, cross-legged, looking bemused at the entire proceeding. I thought to myself, I have to learn more about this guy. So I contacted CCP Manifest to ask if Sisyphus would be interested in an interview.
Fortunately for me, and hopefully for all you too, he agreed.
Who is CCP Sisyphus? What did you bring to the table that CCP saw as a valuable addition to their team?
My name is Kenny Crowe, I'm an Aussie that spent a heap of time in Europe and has now ended up on the lovely rock of Iceland. I have a Bachelor of Technology in Communications from Macquarie University in Australia ? I like sitting on the edge of technology and how we use it to interact. I spent a good part of my career working with Telecommunication systems ? as a project manager in Finland and some time in Australia, the US, and various parts of Europe.
Why the name Sisyphus?
Heh. I actually took the name from Albert Camus ? "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." Working on a service like EVE is an endless task. We will never finish making this game, and it's silly to attempt work on it with an end in mind ? you?ll never have a "finished product" because the universe is designed to be able to scale with new systems and designs and players.
So instead I wanted to remind myself to take enjoyment in the daily struggle To enjoy taking part in the daily effort of constantly making EVE better.
When did you first start at CCP? What is your history with the company (your various roles and titles)?
I started in March 2007 in the Customer Service. I had had no previous experience in the game industry at all, and had to find my feet.
In 2008 I moved into Quality Assurance as a tester. I really enjoyed getting stuck into the nitty gritty of the game here, but found myself drifting towards the methods CCP used in organizing how we get work done, and over the years moved into a Scrum Master role for a number of teams.
During 2011 I moved into purely being a Scrum Master and started dipping my toes into the earlier planning stages as well.
Finally in 2012 I fully transitioned into being a producer.
What is your current job at CCP? What projects are you currently involved with? What have been some of your past projects with CCP?
I am the Product Owner for two teams currently. Pony Express (User Experience enhancements) and Klang (sound!). The main focus of my attention is on the "Player" part of the Character/Player/Customer spread: Immersion, Ease of Use, Accessibility, Pain Point fixes, API.
I'm more interested in how the player can get information about what is happening, and preferably understanding it as well.
Since I've been here a long time I've worked on a whole slew of features, some that stick in my head include Speed Balancing, Sovereignty, EVE Gate + Standings update, Captains Quarters, Paparazzi image service, Cerberus localization... And many more
What has been your proudest moment at CCP? A particular project, perhaps?
Oh wow. Where to start? Two real high points were working with Team Domination (Apocrypha + Dominion, Sov revamp) and Team Stonehenge (Character Creator, then onto Cerberus localization system.) On both teams I learnt a lot of very important lessons in how a team works well together, as well as the hows and whys of planning, (including some important things we missed ...)
Which person (people) do you report to directly? Does anybody report to you?
I answer to CCP Ripley. There are currently ten people who?s work I need to keep a handle on as the product owner for Pony Express and Klang.
What does a normal working day look like for CCP Sisyphus?
I am still looking for a normal day. I normally get in quite early (pre 8am), to read mails, forums, blogs and plan out things I need to do for the day before most of the office gets in. Pre-lunch is mainly getting a handle on what the teams are currently up to (meetings, trying out newly submitted code, etc.) After lunch is normally taken up coordinating with other teams and dealing with the issue of the day.
I often try to get in about 30-60 mins of Eve during a day. Often this happens over lunch or before I head home for the evening.
Explain more fully what the role of the producer is? I assume you don't actually do any coding, you're more involved in ensuring deadlines are met, etc.
God no ? don't let me near the codebase! The last coding I did was back at university hacking some personal user tools for a play-by-email game called Galaxy. Pretty primitive really.
Simply said, a producer has to set expectations, and ensure they get met.
A big part of what I do is working out "what should my teams be working on?" Lots of discussions with all sorts of people in the company about problems and opportunities
For problems: are they really problems, how serious are they, what do these problem effect, what other related problems are already being worked on (and so on)? As I get a better feel for a possible issue I start asking various people about possible solutions to it, then how difficult would a solution be, how much of an individual problem would be dealt with by that solution. Once some level of agreement on a problem/solution exists, and it has been given some priority, it is time to get a team fully involved in making prototypes, or eventually getting a feature ready to go out.
For opportunities, it?s about seeing how we could modify or augment existing systems to make them stronger or create new paths within development that adhere to the same design paradigm as EVE. The sandbox affords us lots of opportunities in this area, and my role as producer helps CCP to narrow in on what should work both for EVE?s evolution as well as realistically within the skills and abilities of my teams.
Along the way there is all the fun of working with the team to discover how long work will take, when we can promise to deliver specific bits, and making sure that when a team can?t solo a feature that they co-operate with other teams.
On the other side I have to be on the look out for work for my teams. I need to know what they enjoy working on and are passionate about, and I try to get them involved in projects that excite them.
CCP works on two week sprints. Using an actual example, from Retribution or even Odyssey, can you explain how a large project is broken up into these sprints over the course of its development for an expansion?
OK, let?s take an example I'm rather happy with ? the Radial Menu.
This started with the idea of "Navigation". We noticed (over a year ago now) that some trial players just stopped playing when they got to the part of the tutorial where we explain movement. So we spent a little time looking at what, exactly, new players were doing at those times and thinking about how to improve this.
Our designers spent some time working out a number of possible designs and control methods until we came to a few designs that looked good. During the tail end of Retribution (while doing the damage notifications etc) we spent a couple of sprints in our own sandbox making a few very hacky functional prototypes so we could evaluate what we intended to do.
In Odyssey we then spent a couple more sprints doing a more polished prototype and internal testing to get the look and feel of the interface and feedback right. It was here that we hit some technical limits on making our feedback look like our concepts, and that had to be changed.
Then, over three more sprints our prototype was rewritten into the main branch of code (using the correct coding practices, etc.) and made ready for a presentation at Fanfest.
Then we spent two sprints where all we did was polish. Getting more player feedback from the Singularity test server and tweaking how the code works to make the experience even better. No more functionality was added at this stage.
In the last sprint before Odyssey we looked at porting to our release branch and making sure no bugs got in.
So, CCP works on two weeks sprints. What exactly happens when it becomes apparent that a particular task is not going to be able to be completed in those two weeks. I'm wondering if the task is redefined and features are stripped? Or does the task go ahead as planned?
Oh, nice simple question I see. :)
This is made a bit more complicated by a lot of things ? is the story (a subset of a feature) a dependency for another team? How much other work is reliant on this? Is the additional work known or unknown? What is blocking the task? Etc., etc.
So lets take a step back. In a very brief and simple summary: we start planning by looking at all the things we feel need some attention and decide "what things need attention for next release and can fit within our capabilities." Those things are then prioritized into "Must, Could, Should" for that time frame and divided amongst teams. Each feature also has its own stories prioritized in the same way. For a particular release we need to make sure all the "must" stories are finished. If one of those proves to be a bit more complicated than originally assumed, the "shoulds" and "coulds" get delayed or scoped out.
The same thing will happen pretty much regardless of when in a sprint it happens ? if a particular story gets into trouble then something will get delayed, either the story or another of lower priority. Most time the teams can be clever and estimate additional time for tasks they believe will be very complex, so sometimes we get the other "problem" of tasks being faster than expected.
As an example, the Corp Recruitment feature had a number of parts including the back end search capabilities, search UI, advertisement UI, recruitment flow, etc. We found out, later than expected, about some hard blockers from the DUST 514 side that made the recruitment flow backend very challenging. But that was a "could" for the initial release of Retribution ? as the searching and matching was our main priority. Because of this we were able to rework the backend to support multiple recruitment flows (DUST and EVE are slightly different) and then made it into a "must" for Retribution 1.1.
In the run up to an expansion, what role do you play in determining the feature set for that expansion?
Well, I spend a lot of my time involved in this, although I am far from being any kind of final decision maker. For the last couple of months I've been exploring some "areas ripe for improvement" with our game designers, art and sound teams. I've put forward a number of candidates for the next planning period, and then there is the whole horse trading show of prioritization where the effort and value of all the possible candidates is discussed and weighed.
How has development changed since you first joined CCP until today? As a producer, you've no doubt been in the middle of these changes. How has expansion preparation changed?
Oh yes! When I first joined CCP we used to joke about the stone tablets coming down to us from on high. I remember a few times when special projects were being done which resulted in a huge amount of testing by the feature teams which hadn't been considered. The result of that was a lot of overtime ...
The method we use to track development is constantly evolving every release. Now we are improving our ability to see all the balls we have in the air and prioritizing across all the work being done (instead of just release features etc). I wish I could show you the view of our production wall ? we have lots of cards showing all the various projects, internal improvements, game features etc up there, and the various producers work together to make sure this is prioritized and farmed out to teams.
For a particular planning period, which often coincides with a release, we will prioritize the features according to MoSCoW ? Must have, Should have if possible, Could have if it wont effect anything else, and Won't be able to do during this period. Note that Won't doesn't mean not important, it just means that something doesn't fit coherently into the current planning period.
I do know that there has been a lot better prioritization and planning for "problems" in recent years. When I first joined CCP, the pre-release crunch was almost a rite of passage ? "how many releases have you survived?" ? where long days and weekend work were common occurrences for everyone. Estimated work is getting more realistic, and the teams are usually working at a steadier pace. In recent years there have been no real "all hands on deck weekend" events, although there are some teams and individuals who still put in heroic extra hours.
I've recently learned that while there is a QA Director at CCP, there is no specific QA group. On your teams, is QA something that you oversee? Or is that something that is filtered down to the directors? I'm curious how your teams QA their own products?
Well, the best person to ask is CCP Goliath, but I can say a few words.
The core of development are the teams. There are developers on the team with different specializations, but that doesn't mean that is the only thing they do. There are devs who are QA specialists, who meet regularly to talk and work out QA procedures, and the QA director gives them direction. But those QA specialists are not the only ones who find and fix bugs ? everyone on the team finds and fixes bugs.
We do "whole team quality", which is exactly what it says on the tin. Everyone is involved in the testing ? from inception to release and after. We have QA guys involved in design reviews, we have coders helping out with mass tests on Singularity, we have producers filing bug reports. Basically the team identifies what testing they have to do, and do it. Sometimes they need help or advice on how to deal with particular problem areas, and help is available. The QA director makes sure that the tech and techniques for testing are widely known and used among the teams.
How often are you involved with the CSM? Can you give some specific examples where elements of a developing feature were changed due to their feedback?
Well, let?s continue with the above example, concerning development of radial menus. In the early stages we talked to the CSM about our concerns with navigation and flying in space ? listening to their examples and use cases. Later during the CSM summit we presented the overall design goals and talked with them about the research we had done. Heavy concern over "changing UI" was brought up here, which led us to leave navigation options in right-click menus. Also we got interested in exploring gesture based interfaces after these talks.
Now, let's give you a CCP Soundwave moment, where you can start waxing on about dream features. Talk about some features you'd like to see in the game. These are obviously features that may never see the light of day. But as someone who plays EVE, what sorts of things would make your playtime more enjoyable and more exciting. Be as down-to-earth or pie-in-the-sky as you want.
Dangerous question time. I have a weird collection of games, but I've always liked games where you can add your own narrative ? and the better the game responds the more it hooks me. Some of my installed games are heavier on the pre-narrative (Borderlands I + II, GTA series) others are much lighter (Morrowind, Crusader Kings II, Minecraft, Sins of a Solar Empire), but in all of them you can set your own goals and challenges ? and I suppose this really colours the way I like to play EVE.
My biggest desire is to feel like I'm immersed in a science fiction universe ? it should look and feel like something hi tech and futuristic (imagining such movies as Prometheus, Oblivion, Minority Report), and also the universe should have more impact on me (and me on it!) Things like putting the empires into a hot-war rather than the more cold-war scenario we have now. Make the morale and experience of your own crew matter (Were they trained by the empires? Are they a criminal crew? Where do their loyalties lie?) Being able to start a character from a pirate faction, or even as a member of an Alliance from the get go ? and to have that choice change how the rest of the EVE NPC's react to you.
Flying around space ? I'd love free warping. Plotting courses around planets, tackling freighters mid-route to a gate and looting it before concord can make it there ? or how about removing stargates altogether and allowing ships the ability to "superwarp" between systems so long as you have enough power/fuel/other requirements.
I'd love to run a repair station in lawless space that pirates visit for repairs and rumors, or be part of a nomadic rag tag fleet that survives from the materials we find on the edges of space and never visits settled space stations, or fight to protect the citizens of my own planet who provide food and training for my crews, and run the factories that build my engines of destruction.
How about actually dealing with the factory crew on your production lines? Who get better at building a particular ship while in their own factory, or being able to optimize how they produce your ship? Or a ship crew that is familiar with a particular ship layout? Or station crews that refuse to serve you because you killed their friends? How about demilitarized zones where certain tech was considered suspicious?
Intel and fog of war is another favorite of mine. Imagine a fleet commander who receives intel on everything his scouts see, and with a few clicks could issue order for fleet maneuvers ? waypoints, targets etc.? AWACS ships! Scout drones that can give remote views or scan ships! Hiding in the shadow of planets or running silent behind an asteroid while pirates are scanning for you!
Lots of pie in the sky here. :)
Did you play EVE before joining CCP? Can you give any information on where you played? What organizations you belonged to? You don't strike me having ever been a Goon, for instance.
Oh yes I play EVE. My wife constantly reminds me of one of our first interactions ? I played in beta and wanted to get the game on the first day, but it wasn't going to be available in Helsinki. I learnt that there was going to be sale in Stockholm, so I asked my (future) wife to place the order as she spoke Swedish and I didn't. She then proceeded to put together a production corp that made so much ISK I can still live off the proceeds today.
At the start I was heavily involved in Sabaoth and Endless, and passionately "hated" everything Taggart Transdimensional stood for (in-character, of course.) I loved the idea of EVE, and loved that the EVE server was, effectively, a PVP roleplay server. I jumped on piracy early on ? and made a fair income on ransoms and protection rackets.
I miss corps like the Teddybears. Mentioning this I feel the need to do some small corp piracy again ...
How often do you play EVE Online now? What areas of the game most interest you currently?
I play daily, and my wife constantly refers to EVE as "your digital mistress". I have to admit I don't like participating in the meta-game of alliance politics very much , so I tend to stick to smaller corporations with a more casual attitude and more opportunity for making an individual impact.
I tend to regularly make new characters to try out new parts of the game. A bad case of alt-itis I guess. I've been getting heavily into exploration and salvaging with my last character, and am looking forward to when he will be able to survive and prosper in wormhole space.
Thank you, sir, for the interview.
You are welcome.
Source: Getting To Know CCP Sisyphus: An Interview (http://)