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Greetings!

It’s a new year, and we thought it would be interesting to give all of you an update on the status of the team! There’s quite a few of us, and we hope you’ll enjoy this brief insight into who’s working on updates, fixes and exciting new content for your enjoyment!

My name is Carmille and I work as a Producer on CK3; I’ve been with the team for about one and a half years now. CK2 was one of my favorite games and the reason that I joined Paradox to begin with, so naturally I am feeling quite blessed to work on the project :)

Firstly, an announcement! It has been decided that Alexander Oltner (aka @rageair) will be stepping up as the new Game Director for the project! Alexander is the (now former) Design Lead for CK3, and has spent many years designing features for both CK2 and CK3. He started at the company in 2015 and, if you’ve tuned in to any of the pre-release streams or interviews, you surely know who he is already. Long-term fans might even recognize him as the lead designer behind Holy Fury for CK2, or perhaps you’ve seen him in one of the many past Dev Clashes. We have full confidence that Alex will be able to take up the reins and steer the project towards a bright future! The former Game Director, Henrik Fåhraeus (known on the forums as Doomdark), is ascending the ranks and will instead act as the Creative Director for many titles, CK3 included.

With that said, let's move on to the team itself!
You might think that with the release of the base game, the amount of people working on the project would be reduced. We’re actually doing the exact opposite, and are in the process of expanding the team instead! This will give us a lot more flexibility and freedom and should allow us to work on several different things at the same time.
Naturally, we need to train and onboard our new team members so it is not something we can start with straight away, but our hope is that you will see the effects within a not so distant future.

Now, how many are actually working on CK3 and what are they doing?

The team is made up of many different disciplines, working together to create amazing experiences! We’ll go into more details on each of them below.

Producer

We have four people working in Production (myself included). Our job is to help the team bring the design to life and into your hands. We do this by setting up (and iterating upon) processes and workflows, identifying deadlines and milestones, making plans to hit those dates while staying in good shape and ensuring that everybody knows what to do. We can often be seen grooming CK3s task and bug database and making sure everything is according to plan, up to date and representative of the current situation as well as spending a lot of time looking at numbers in spreadsheets.

Game Design

Our Game Designer is working very closely together with the Game Director. Their focus is split between what is currently being developed and nailing down the design for future expansions. They can very frequently be seen playing the game as it is being developed and make tweaks or highlight areas of concern so that the feature feels as great in the game as it looks on paper.

UX Design

Just like Game Design, our two UX Designers have their focus split between what is happening in the game right now and what is being designed for future expansions. UX Design and Game Design work closely together and make sure that new features are both fun and user friendly. They focus on interactions and user interface, although they can often be seen giving feedback on when something just doesn’t feel intuitive.

Content Design

Although the two previously mentioned design disciplines can sometimes be seen creating content for features as they are being developed, it's the Content Designers that create the vast majority of it. We have eight Content Designers working on CK3, and unlike the other two Design disciplines, they are almost entirely focused on working with what’s being developed in the game here and now. They pride themselves on creating historically plausible content, and will spend a lot of their time researching something before it is being put into the game. They are skilled scripters and writers and very passionate about ensuring that all features have a soul made out of supportive events, decisions, interactions, etc.

Code

There are seven Programmers and two Tech Leads working on CK3. The Tech Leads are responsible for the overall technical health and spend a lot of their time setting up (and iterating upon) processes and best practices for the project. They play a major part during all development stages and are constantly aware of the big picture and the challenges that could come with it.

Our Programmers are responsible for building the functionality and foundation of the features themselves. They work very closely together with the other disciplines on their features and can often be seen providing Code Support or in other ways using their skillset to make life easier for the non-coders. They will also keep an eye on performance and the overall stability of the game and jump upon an issue as soon as it appears.

Art Director

There is one Art Director working on CK3, and their responsibility is the overall artistic vision. They work closely together with the Game Director and Production, but also with all of the Artists in the team.

2D UI Art

We have three 2D Artists on the team and they can often be seen collaborating with Code and UX Design to bring the interfaces of new CK3 features to life after Code has provided their framework. They will also create icons and illustrations as well as investigate artistic improvements to the UIs that is not part of the UX design.

2D Concept Art

Our two Concept Artists help the game team by visualizing assets before they are to be created by a 3D Artist.

3D Character Art

Just as the name indicates, our three Character Artists work on anything related to our characters. This not only includes the characters itself, but also the clothing, headgears and hairstyles. In addition to that they are also responsible for creating the Units that are walking around the map. They can often be seen working closely together with Animation.

3D Environment Art

These Artists work mostly on the map itself. We have four of them and they can often be seen creating holdings, ships, siege weapons and other map assets. They are also painting the map as well as making sure that all the units, holdings and other buildings are located where it makes sense, both from a historical perspective and an artistic one.

Animation

There is one Animator working on the project and their main focus is on bringing our characters and units to life. They can be seen working on brand new poses and adding more variety to existing ones to make sure the characters show a wide range of different emotions and visually support different situations.

VFX

CK3 is not a very VFX heavy game, and because of this we do not have a VFX artist working with us full time, but only on demand.

QA

Our QA is the glue that keeps everything together. We have a core team of seven QA, but expand to a lot more once we are starting to wrap up and getting ready for a release. They can often be seen playing the game and testing the new features as they become ready, but it is important to note that this is not the only thing they do. They have a holistic view of quality and work closely together with all disciplines to make sure that the end product is as great as possible. Sometimes this is achieved through testing alone, but other times they can identify a need to redesign / introduce more content to a feature that feels a bit weak or perhaps a need to tweak a process or workflow within the Project itself.

Audio

The Audio team works on all PDS games, so we can’t really claim them for ourselves.
When they do work on CK3, they are often around two to three people and can be seen working on sound effects for our new features as well as composing music that fit the theme of the expansion.

Naturally, we don’t all work on the same features or fixes at the same time, that’d be very confusing! We’re divided into smaller groups, each focusing on their own set of features or content. Once a week we have a couple of hours set aside to make sure that everybody on the CK3 team has time to sit down and play the game and see for themselves how everything is being tied together.

The team is currently busy working on two things: one is big and the other is smaller. The smaller of these you'll be hearing more of in the coming weeks...
 
Me to Dev Diary #48:

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Nothing discourages developer communication quite so effectively as being rude to the developers when they communicate.
 
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After rereading the OP, I'm coming more around to the idea that the whole post was a last minute scramble to add to a really weak Dev diary. I assume the original diary was literally just "were working on some new content that we can talk about in a few weeks" so they added a bunch of fluff about adding new staff to pad out to diary.
Jeah after your post I get also this feeling.
 
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After rereading the OP, I'm coming more around to the idea that the whole post was a last minute scramble to add to a really weak Dev diary. I assume the original diary was literally just "were working on some new content that we can talk about in a few weeks" so they added a bunch of fluff about adding new staff to pad out to diary.
Yeah because like I've been trying to express they created deadlines for themselves by releasing dates for us the expect dev diary's or at least news and after 1 date (I wont call it a delay because apparently that doesn't sit well with some) they came up to the second date and unfortunately found that they had nothing for us so this is what we got
 
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Nothing discourages developer communication quite so effectively as being rude to the developers when they communicate.
The whole problem is that they don't communicate, and that when they eventually do, it's barely anything of value. If they had taken 2 months to write a very meaty DD, akin to the ones I:R and EU4 have been getting that would be amazing, but instead it took 2 months for basically nothing, when other paradox games have been getting huge info drops.
 
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Nothing discourages developer communication quite so effectively as being rude to the developers when they communicate.

People who react to this with "respectfully disagree" are truly delusional.

Like, it doesn't get more factual than that, guys. This is on the level of "the sky is blue".
 
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Nothing discourages developer communication quite so effectively as being rude to the developers when they communicate.
No body want them to communicate less. In my opinion it was a very long time until getting some meati dev update. But we'll the content of it was unexpected. It's good to hear that they are expanding and getting into many parts of the game to expand the base, but it's just some information about the parts of the business. But I am no new employee I am a customer and want to know new information about development progress dlc etc. Not a whole Site of what department makes what in the industry.
 
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nothing discourages paying customers like lack of communication, lack of content, and lack of content news. funny how that works ennit

Well I don't think Paradox is demanding that you pay them, are they?

Meanwhile you are demanding that they communicate with you, but when they do so, you are extremely rude.
 
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No body want them to communicate less. In my opinion it was a very long time until getting some meati dev update. But we'll the content of it was unexpected. It's good to hear that they are expanding and getting into many parts of the game to expand the base, but it's just some information about the parts of the business. But I am no new employee I am a customer and want to know new information about development progress dlc etc. Not a whole Site of what department makes what.

Nobody wants them to communicate less?

The amount of rude comments in this thread says otherwise. Every rude comment reduces the chance that a developer will be like "oh, let me chime in here".
 
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Yeah and that's all well and good however all the other paradox titles got up and running real quick after the break was over so if they say mid January why would it be wrong to assume they might pop it out a little sooner than 2 months later is all I'm saying, like you realize imperator has gotten a literal update not just a dev diary but an actual update with content

I honestly don't know what point you're making now. You said that dev diary was delayed. It wasn't delayed. If you think it was delayed, that's because you misread the "mid-January at the earliest" post. If your imagined "delay" caused you to infer things about today's upcoming dev diary, that's on you for imagining a delay and then randomly inferring things from it.

What other Paradox games (that are years old and are at different stages of their development cycles) are doing is irrelevant.
 
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I honestly don't know what point you're making now. You said that dev diary was delayed. It wasn't delayed. If you think it was delayed, that's because you misread the "mid-January at the earliest" post. If your imagined "delay" caused you to infer things about today's upcoming dev diary, that's on you for imagining a delay and then randomly inferring things from it.

What other Paradox games (that are years old and are at different stages of their development cycles) are doing is irrelevant.
dude whatever debate your trying to have with me is done neither one of us have any idea wtf the other one is talking about and thats pretty clear
 
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People are literally just respectfully disagreeing with every single comment that doesn't worship their viewpoint lmao.

Get a life.

And goodbye, I'm going to do something useful.
 
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Nobody wants them to communicate less?

The amount of rude comments in this thread says otherwise. Every rude comment reduces the chance that a developer will be like "oh, let me chime in here".
Which post are you referring in you opinion as rude? Give me a hint to understand what is rude for you .
 
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People are literally just respectfully disagreeing with every single comment that doesn't worship their viewpoint lmao.

Get a life.

And goodbye, I'm going to do something useful.
uhhhhhh hello????? thats what respectfully disagree means.... IT MEANS YOU DONT AGREE WITH IT LMFAO

edit: all caps was a bit much ill be more respectful, But still thats literally what respectfully disagree means
 
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I honestly don't know what point you're making now. You said that dev diary was delayed. It wasn't delayed. If you think it was delayed, that's because you misread the "mid-January at the earliest" post. If your imagined "delay" caused you to infer things about today's upcoming dev diary, that's on you for imagining a delay and then randomly inferring things from it.

What other Paradox games (that are years old and are at different stages of their development cycles) are doing is irrelevant.
1. They shouldn't have said January at the earliest if they knew it wasn't happening, they should have then just said February. Even if it wasn't a delay it was still a bad idea to do that.

2. If anything newer games should be getting more attention than older games. The fact that the most recent game has had less new information than a game that came out in 2013 isn't good.
 
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Well I don't think Paradox is demanding that you pay them, are they?

Meanwhile you are demanding that they communicate with you, but when they do so, you are extremely rude.
So you suggest us to not buy paradox product? Well, they would say you "thanks" for that, for sure.
 
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This honestly sounds like it should have been delayed and combined with the next dev diary. Knowing there are dev changes.... I would say nice but that implies that its particularly relevant, so basically should have just added this on to an actual update on the game we all paid money for and some even paid extra for the content that many thought would have been at least teased in this diary.
 
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