- Dec 14, 1999
- 19.064
- 71.555
Hi everyone, as we are about to celebrate ten years since the original release of Victoria 2, I wanted to delve into a small retrospective of it. First of all, for me personally Victoria 2 was the last of an era of games, where I was leading a small studio of 7-8 people, where we released 1, sometimes 2 games in a year, with a minor expansion or 2. It was a completely different decade than the decade that has been since..
So how did we start it all? In the spring of 2008 we were busy working on Hearts of Iron III, but we needed to start thinking about which game to make for the next year. Back then the decision was basically me and Fredrik Wester talking about options for a few minutes and then we decided which one. In April, Chris King mailed me the pitch for making a sequel to Victoria, which we quickly decided to try. If you click the spoiler here, you’ll be able to read the original document.
So, we still worked all summer on wrapping up HoI3, which launched the 7th of August 2009, pretty much exactly 1 year ago today. That was one hell of an ambitious project, maybe too ambitious for 11 months of development for 7 people, so the launch was a bit less than stellar.
Later in August we had Gamescom, and it was usually our best PR opportunity those days, so we wanted to announce the new game then, even if pretty much had nothing. Our 2 artists ,Jonas Jakobsson and Fredrik Toll, had made a fake screenshot and some concept art, and Chris King wrote a small design outline. I then made a small 2 page PDF that I used as a presentation when talking to the press. We had nothing else, but still got some nice articles
Back home the goal was to start the development by September 1st, but as most of you remember, the launch of Hearts of Iron III was a bit rocky so most of the team spent september and october on fixing bugs in that game, while I did the pre-production engineering for Victoria 2.
The timeline of the project was not particularly ambitious for the era, but these days it looks kind of crazy.
At the same time we also did the following expansions EU3:Heir to the Throne (autumn 2009) and HoI3: Semper Fi (Spring 2010)
We had recruited 4 new people during the summer and autumn of 2009 so the studio was now 12 people, and for me personally everything felt great with development and schedules.
The Studio in 2009-2010
Johan Andersson (Johan) - Lead Designer / Project Lead / Programmer
Henrik Fåhraeus (Doomdark) - Designer/Programmer
Thomas Johansson (Besuchov) -Lead Programmer
Fredrik Zetterman (Tegus) - Programmer
Dan Lind (Podcat) - Programmer
Olof Björk (birken) -Programmer
Björn Johannesen (Brother Bean) -Content Designer
Chris King (King) - QA/Designer
Jonas Jakobsson (yonaz) - 2d Art
Fredrik Toll (Aerie) - 3d Art
Sara Wendel-Örtqvist (Solsara) - Content Designer
Linda Kiby (Kallocain) - Community Manager
While pretty much everyone worked at V2 during the year, Henrik, Olof & Sara were primarily trying to make the expansions.
Some interesting tidbits about the development is that the game was started by taking the HoI3 code, ripping away systems we did not need, and implementing a new map that had been designed by some V1 modders, including OHgamer. The first 2 months was spent ripping away systems, rewriting stuff we knew we needed that was in Victoria for our new engine etc. Even if we started developing new stuff during the autumn, we still had HoI3 code to rip away in february 2010. Back then we had no Jomini layer, or an empty Marius project to build upon for new games, so all new ones were started by taking an old one, and ripping away code.
Tegus & Podcat spent most of their time on implementing the world market, which is one of the most complex systems we’ve ever done in a game. It had to handle single individual pops being able to purchase goods, and also allow volumes by millions, and all in a contained market. One funny right of passage is hiring a new programmer who has been a fan of V2 and thinks “the world market code is bugged, I’ll fix it, and then the sweet summer child looks into the code and quickly becomes a jaded cynical veteran While there have been funny bugs in it, most problems for the players have been due to one of two things, either its a market crash due to the chaos of a closed system, or it is due to losses due to scaling calculations which is non-solvable
I personally wrote the pop system and the entire politics system in a few weeks in november, and I had great fun with doing that. I wanted everything to be controlled by script files, so designers could tweak things themselves, and also so that modders could do whatever they wanted.
One thing that I remember we spent a lot of time on in development was the tooltips for effects and triggers. I really wanted to avoid complex things in the script to be unreadable by humans, so I tried to combine multiple objects together in tooltips, so instead of 5 code-like lines in the tooltips, you’d get “20% of the Yankee Craftsmen in New York gains +0.2 militancy”.
As you noticed in the list of people from the studio we did not have much QA back then, only King as a part-time QA. Nowadays, each team has multiple embedded QA, several outsource QA from partners, and the studio has a central QA department as well. Speaking of outsourcing, this was the first time we tried to use a QA studio to test the game, which we did twice in June.
We finally launched the game August 13th 2010, and the world was changed forever.
So how did we start it all? In the spring of 2008 we were busy working on Hearts of Iron III, but we needed to start thinking about which game to make for the next year. Back then the decision was basically me and Fredrik Wester talking about options for a few minutes and then we decided which one. In April, Chris King mailed me the pitch for making a sequel to Victoria, which we quickly decided to try. If you click the spoiler here, you’ll be able to read the original document.
Victoria was a strongly niche game that did not enjoy the commercial success of either the Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron brand. This makes a mainstream commercial release of a sequel a dicey prospect at best. However the brand enjoys a cult following amongst its supporters and if we can budget correctly and go for a download only release we should be able to produce a profitable sequel. Apart from the profit benefit the production of a sequel to a niche title will also help the Paradox brand, by continuing to produce games out of the main stream we will keep our reputation as a ‘real’ strategy game developer.
The Core Concept
Pops are on the basic level describes as follows. Nationality, population size, social class break down. Each class then has its cash militancy, its political information (expressed as percentage support for each party rather than the more complicated shifting issues) and literacy. Under hood we can consider exactly how these things work, but the player is presented with pie charts that show these things. Thus our pops preserve its basic role, but now are less work to manage
There is no manual promotion, it is rather unrealistic to have the Kaiser walk into a farm and say you guys are now factory workers. Instead the population will promote itself based on things like education, local demand for goods, job opportunities. Although this will take tweaking to get it feeling right it will remove one of the greatest micro management chores in Victoria. (Not from a project planning point of view to get this right we would probably want to add on an extra month or so of beta testing without much programmer support from developers, say a day a week or less even, this would allow extended testing to get it fairly balanced without adding significantly to the budget).
Economy
One of the key strengths of Victoria that made it different from other brands on the market is its economy system; Revolutions with its auto building of factories push it almost into a niche of its own. For a Victoria 2 to prosper we need to play to the strengths of the original. We are looking for a mix of both easy and more complicated ways to make the economic system feel more real.
For simple solutions I present 3. Firstly there is a simple cap on the number of people who can work in farming or resource gathering in a province. This prevents the millions of farmers and labourers you see in Victoria. This also creates the real life pressures for immigration. Technology will reduce the number of farmers and increase the number of labourers that can work in a province.
Next a province can have more than one resource, and farmers/ labourers shift working according to demand, it also means that an area like the Rhur will still produce food (which it did do)
Thirdly we place limits on the construction of certain factories. We define inputs as hard to ship (like coal and iron) and for a factory that uses a hard to ship resource it can only appear in a region that produces one of them. This will mean that German heavy industry will be concentrated in the Rhur region (which it did do historically).
For a more complex economic overhaul we have two suggestions. Firstly craftsmen will produce a small amount of goods even if there is no factory in the state. This represents the small artisans and workshops (proto-industrialisation as it is called in period) that would produce goods. As the capitalist grows and makes more money factories start appearing that craftsmen will work in. TO see how this will benefit the game, you get a late game invention like the car, immediately small car workshops will go into action producing a small number of these, allowing the market to function much more effectively. It also allows backward countries (like China) to produce a limited amount of industrial goods. This change will allow both the economic system to function more effectively and add more realism. In addition it should actually make the game a little easier for new players.
Second is an overhaul of the world market. At the moment the world market functions on global scale and as a constant injection of money. Instead each territorially continuous part of your country functions as one market (we can choose to go for a more complicated system where internal markets are dynamically further divided based on transport links if we so wish). They have 0 tariffs between each other and share a single external tariff. Any market that cannot supply itself seeks to import from another market, selecting the cheapest first. This is done as a function of distance and tariff, but we can throw in things like merchant shipping and transport links to further influence it if so wish. Two markets can create a customs union with a senior partner who sets a single external tariff for all members (like the Zollverein). We can then add blockades that prevent routes for trade. For example in a war between France and Germany their mutual frontier is automatically blockaded meaning that each others markets are blocked to each other and trade that would move through each others territory (like German buying good from Spain) now has to take a longer route and is more expensive.
Our choice here is how much depth we can choose to add, we can add diplomatic actions like tariff deals, allow people to set individual tariffs for countries effecting relations (so you can give lower tariffs to countries you like and high to ones you dislike), peace options that force countries to remove tariffs to your merchants (the capitulations of the Ottoman Empire) the possibilities here are huge.
Government and Politics
The other strength of Victoria was its government system. This was why we had to keep the connection between the population and how the viewed the government. Basic changes we are looking for are improvements to the electoral system, more options for voting, better logic for how the population votes and different ways of counting the votes. We also want to have the party issues be more dynamic, so as your country changes parties may also change what they stand for to keep up with the times.
Another change is to add a new population job, the bureaucrat. These people need to paid for by the state (and are thus a money sink) and are required to govern a state effectively. Thus spending on things like education and crime fighting’s effect is limited by the bureaucracy that supports it. Thus we can create an effect like this, on the Eastern seaboard of the USA there are a lot bureaucrats who can government effectively, in the territories there is a limited number of bureaucrats and it feels a bit like the wild west.
Further work would be needed to flesh up other parts of the game, but this is the basic pitch.
The Core Concept
Pops are on the basic level describes as follows. Nationality, population size, social class break down. Each class then has its cash militancy, its political information (expressed as percentage support for each party rather than the more complicated shifting issues) and literacy. Under hood we can consider exactly how these things work, but the player is presented with pie charts that show these things. Thus our pops preserve its basic role, but now are less work to manage
There is no manual promotion, it is rather unrealistic to have the Kaiser walk into a farm and say you guys are now factory workers. Instead the population will promote itself based on things like education, local demand for goods, job opportunities. Although this will take tweaking to get it feeling right it will remove one of the greatest micro management chores in Victoria. (Not from a project planning point of view to get this right we would probably want to add on an extra month or so of beta testing without much programmer support from developers, say a day a week or less even, this would allow extended testing to get it fairly balanced without adding significantly to the budget).
Economy
One of the key strengths of Victoria that made it different from other brands on the market is its economy system; Revolutions with its auto building of factories push it almost into a niche of its own. For a Victoria 2 to prosper we need to play to the strengths of the original. We are looking for a mix of both easy and more complicated ways to make the economic system feel more real.
For simple solutions I present 3. Firstly there is a simple cap on the number of people who can work in farming or resource gathering in a province. This prevents the millions of farmers and labourers you see in Victoria. This also creates the real life pressures for immigration. Technology will reduce the number of farmers and increase the number of labourers that can work in a province.
Next a province can have more than one resource, and farmers/ labourers shift working according to demand, it also means that an area like the Rhur will still produce food (which it did do)
Thirdly we place limits on the construction of certain factories. We define inputs as hard to ship (like coal and iron) and for a factory that uses a hard to ship resource it can only appear in a region that produces one of them. This will mean that German heavy industry will be concentrated in the Rhur region (which it did do historically).
For a more complex economic overhaul we have two suggestions. Firstly craftsmen will produce a small amount of goods even if there is no factory in the state. This represents the small artisans and workshops (proto-industrialisation as it is called in period) that would produce goods. As the capitalist grows and makes more money factories start appearing that craftsmen will work in. TO see how this will benefit the game, you get a late game invention like the car, immediately small car workshops will go into action producing a small number of these, allowing the market to function much more effectively. It also allows backward countries (like China) to produce a limited amount of industrial goods. This change will allow both the economic system to function more effectively and add more realism. In addition it should actually make the game a little easier for new players.
Second is an overhaul of the world market. At the moment the world market functions on global scale and as a constant injection of money. Instead each territorially continuous part of your country functions as one market (we can choose to go for a more complicated system where internal markets are dynamically further divided based on transport links if we so wish). They have 0 tariffs between each other and share a single external tariff. Any market that cannot supply itself seeks to import from another market, selecting the cheapest first. This is done as a function of distance and tariff, but we can throw in things like merchant shipping and transport links to further influence it if so wish. Two markets can create a customs union with a senior partner who sets a single external tariff for all members (like the Zollverein). We can then add blockades that prevent routes for trade. For example in a war between France and Germany their mutual frontier is automatically blockaded meaning that each others markets are blocked to each other and trade that would move through each others territory (like German buying good from Spain) now has to take a longer route and is more expensive.
Our choice here is how much depth we can choose to add, we can add diplomatic actions like tariff deals, allow people to set individual tariffs for countries effecting relations (so you can give lower tariffs to countries you like and high to ones you dislike), peace options that force countries to remove tariffs to your merchants (the capitulations of the Ottoman Empire) the possibilities here are huge.
Government and Politics
The other strength of Victoria was its government system. This was why we had to keep the connection between the population and how the viewed the government. Basic changes we are looking for are improvements to the electoral system, more options for voting, better logic for how the population votes and different ways of counting the votes. We also want to have the party issues be more dynamic, so as your country changes parties may also change what they stand for to keep up with the times.
Another change is to add a new population job, the bureaucrat. These people need to paid for by the state (and are thus a money sink) and are required to govern a state effectively. Thus spending on things like education and crime fighting’s effect is limited by the bureaucracy that supports it. Thus we can create an effect like this, on the Eastern seaboard of the USA there are a lot bureaucrats who can government effectively, in the territories there is a limited number of bureaucrats and it feels a bit like the wild west.
Further work would be needed to flesh up other parts of the game, but this is the basic pitch.
So, we still worked all summer on wrapping up HoI3, which launched the 7th of August 2009, pretty much exactly 1 year ago today. That was one hell of an ambitious project, maybe too ambitious for 11 months of development for 7 people, so the launch was a bit less than stellar.
Later in August we had Gamescom, and it was usually our best PR opportunity those days, so we wanted to announce the new game then, even if pretty much had nothing. Our 2 artists ,Jonas Jakobsson and Fredrik Toll, had made a fake screenshot and some concept art, and Chris King wrote a small design outline. I then made a small 2 page PDF that I used as a presentation when talking to the press. We had nothing else, but still got some nice articles
Back home the goal was to start the development by September 1st, but as most of you remember, the launch of Hearts of Iron III was a bit rocky so most of the team spent september and october on fixing bugs in that game, while I did the pre-production engineering for Victoria 2.
The timeline of the project was not particularly ambitious for the era, but these days it looks kind of crazy.
| Start | 1st of September 2009 |
| First Show of Playable | 22nd of January 2010 |
| Alpha | 26th of February 2010 |
| Pressdemo | 12th of March 2010 |
| Beta | 30th of April 2010 |
| Gold Master | 4th of June 2010 |
| Release | 13th of August 2010 |
At the same time we also did the following expansions EU3:Heir to the Throne (autumn 2009) and HoI3: Semper Fi (Spring 2010)
We had recruited 4 new people during the summer and autumn of 2009 so the studio was now 12 people, and for me personally everything felt great with development and schedules.
The Studio in 2009-2010
Johan Andersson (Johan) - Lead Designer / Project Lead / Programmer
Henrik Fåhraeus (Doomdark) - Designer/Programmer
Thomas Johansson (Besuchov) -Lead Programmer
Fredrik Zetterman (Tegus) - Programmer
Dan Lind (Podcat) - Programmer
Olof Björk (birken) -Programmer
Björn Johannesen (Brother Bean) -Content Designer
Chris King (King) - QA/Designer
Jonas Jakobsson (yonaz) - 2d Art
Fredrik Toll (Aerie) - 3d Art
Sara Wendel-Örtqvist (Solsara) - Content Designer
Linda Kiby (Kallocain) - Community Manager
While pretty much everyone worked at V2 during the year, Henrik, Olof & Sara were primarily trying to make the expansions.
Some interesting tidbits about the development is that the game was started by taking the HoI3 code, ripping away systems we did not need, and implementing a new map that had been designed by some V1 modders, including OHgamer. The first 2 months was spent ripping away systems, rewriting stuff we knew we needed that was in Victoria for our new engine etc. Even if we started developing new stuff during the autumn, we still had HoI3 code to rip away in february 2010. Back then we had no Jomini layer, or an empty Marius project to build upon for new games, so all new ones were started by taking an old one, and ripping away code.
Tegus & Podcat spent most of their time on implementing the world market, which is one of the most complex systems we’ve ever done in a game. It had to handle single individual pops being able to purchase goods, and also allow volumes by millions, and all in a contained market. One funny right of passage is hiring a new programmer who has been a fan of V2 and thinks “the world market code is bugged, I’ll fix it, and then the sweet summer child looks into the code and quickly becomes a jaded cynical veteran
While there have been funny bugs in it, most problems for the players have been due to one of two things, either its a market crash due to the chaos of a closed system, or it is due to losses due to scaling calculations which is non-solvableI personally wrote the pop system and the entire politics system in a few weeks in november, and I had great fun with doing that. I wanted everything to be controlled by script files, so designers could tweak things themselves, and also so that modders could do whatever they wanted.
One thing that I remember we spent a lot of time on in development was the tooltips for effects and triggers. I really wanted to avoid complex things in the script to be unreadable by humans, so I tried to combine multiple objects together in tooltips, so instead of 5 code-like lines in the tooltips, you’d get “20% of the Yankee Craftsmen in New York gains +0.2 militancy”.
As you noticed in the list of people from the studio we did not have much QA back then, only King as a part-time QA. Nowadays, each team has multiple embedded QA, several outsource QA from partners, and the studio has a central QA department as well. Speaking of outsourcing, this was the first time we tried to use a QA studio to test the game, which we did twice in June.
We finally launched the game August 13th 2010, and the world was changed forever.
- 168
- 83
- 27
- 5
- 1
