Welcome Erepublik V1
by admin- Published:October 12th, 2008
- Comments:102 Comments
- Category:Erepublik V1, Improvements, Goodies, Erepublik beta
Dear Citizens,
As many of you already know, 14th of October will be the first day of Erepublik V1, our pre-launch. As a result, the site will be down today as we make the transfer from BETA to V1.
Here is some fun stuff about the development:
- 4 months of work until the first blueprints were created
- 10.000 hours is the total amount of work for creating the specs, design, developing and testing. Not including the brainstorming fights we had.
- More than 2000 tickets (tasks) for the developers
- More than 200 pages of documentation
- Around 40 km walked by George within the office
- More than 20 team members worked on creating this product
- 4 different major layouts changes
- 2 team members broke up with their girlfriends because they spent most of the time at the office.
All of this because:
- We had a crazy idea that proved to be interesting not just to us (thanks for that)
- You the community quickly showed us the limitations of the beta and how we could make it better
- We were prepared for hundreds of challenges but had to resolve thousands;
- The BETA design did not support a large amount of simultaneous citizens online and we couldn’t grow it technically to its potential; so had to rewrite everything for scalability;
- It became harder and harder to add new features in the old code;
- We have a huge amount of involved citizens that have driven us to work on the weekends and during the nights because we are passionate about making Erepublik a better place for the community.
What we’ve done:
- Changed almost 100% of the code and design;
- Created a slightly different gameplay based on the same ideas of economic, political and geo-political simulations and community interaction. Erepublik is still Risk meets Civilization meets the web on steroids;
- Came up with new modules, improved many and took out a few of the old ones;
- Focused on the “15 minutes user experience” so that citizens that are less excited about their political or economic careers can still have fun during their time in Erepublik.
- Improved the citizen’s interactions
What we have not done
- Gotten it all perfect right from start. We know that some will not like a few of the new features in V1 and others will not like certain things we removed.
- Make all the modules as good as we would like them to be.
- Put all the changes that we wanted to make in this first version of V1
- Found all the bugs, although the ones we know about have been fixed.
What we’ll do:
- Top priority: resolving bugs and security issues that may appear over the next few days and working on the scalability of the new platform;
- Improve the current features and implement new ones: API system, multi-language, mobile version, citizen’s adds, 1vs1 fights, random events, reputation system, create polls, private forums and the list continues
- help the API devs create new interesting apps connected to Erepublik.
Conclusion: We will present to you in a few hours a new Erepublik. A new world in which we have invested a lot of work and energy. A new world that we consider a big step forward but, at the same time, a world that needs much more work and is far from being complete.
The real world might have been created in 6 days but… we are just the admin and the only person with superpowers around here is Cristesco (apparently he says he can find multi accounts when sleeping). Consider this version of V1 as day 1 and enjoy it when we go live!
Thank you all for your support and for being a part of Erepublik.
The Erepublik Team
This week-end I’ll be in Valencia and it will be a great opportunity to meet the Erepublikans (erepublikan = erepublik fan) from Spain. We have people joining this meeting from several Spanish cities like Alicante, Barcelona, Castellón, Madrid and Murcia.
Jakarta, Indonesia
Constanta, Romania
The Erepublik globetrotters started their journey around the world. Here is a picture with one of them in Dubai U.A.E., gazing at the only seven stars hotel in the world, the Burj Al Arab.
Erepublik.com has just reached the 9.700 rank in Alexa. With more that 24,000 daily visits, Erepublik maintained a steady traffic growth in the past months. And remember, we are still in Beta! The average time spend by an user on Erepublik is almost 13 minutes with 16 viewed page in average per visit.
This weekend we had community meetings in two of the top 5 countries in Erepublik. Alexis was our representative member in Spain and me with Geo and Bogdan Adamut met with the Erepublikans in Romania on our monthly meeting. In Bucharest we broke all records with this event which lasted more than … 9 hours. Also in Madrid (see picture) several important Citizens could join, like Zhuge Lian. Meiko, Alyena, Charlie, Kane, vash and maeghith. They’ve talked about the next version of Erepublik (which will be an outstanding one) and Alexis received tremendous amount of feedback from them. Each one who could join this meeting received a “Citizen of The New World” T-shirt (available in online stores by the end of this year).