Game g = new Game();

I have not blogged in a while – mostly because the last couple of weeks have been pretty stressful.

Oh, and apologies for the automated “bookmarks” posts, that contained more and more “Error 500″ links – I removed the post, and disabled the plugin. If I have any interesting links to share, I will twitter them.

In our youth community AT.LANT.IS we want to encourage users to participate as much as possible.

From a game design perspective, users help to “rebuild” Atlantis by earning the ingame currency ORIs in the minigames. As soon as enough ORIs are available, a new feature in the world is unlocked for everyone – a new room, new avatar items, or a new game.

Besides that, more and more users are sending in their stories and drawings to be included in the library or the museum, respectively.

I hope we can gain more momentum with that user generated content – as always, some users seem to get into it more than others, some of them even use other platforms like YouTube:

Very interesting summary of a GDC Austin keynote by Blizzard about WoW (thanks Frank!):

• They try to structure the teams around the people, and not the other way around. They feel strongly that employee strengths should dictate organizational structure, and as a result all reporting structures within the company vary by team.
• Each team on the game aims to be made up of 5-8 people.
• The programming department currently consists of 32 people
• In all, the programming team is responsible for some 5.5 million lines of code.
• The art department is currently sitting at 51 people.
• Overall the art department is responsible for some 1.5 million assets.
• Production department is 10 members strong.
• Creative teams to not report to producers, he pointed out. Team leads, instead, take up leadership roles within individual departments. The art lead, for example, still creates art.
• Design department is 37 members strong.
• Over the years, the team has created some 70,000 spells and some 40,000 NPCs.
• The QA group has tackled some 180,000 bugs since the game launched.
• Localization currently tracks 360,000 text strings and some 2 million words.
• Data centers from Texas to Seoul, over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• As an organization, World of Warcraft utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.

Frank Pearce: “World of Warcraft has completely changed the organization”

Here are some more updates about what’s currently going on in AT.LANT.IS:

Recently, we introduced a more detailed differentiation between the basic and the premium members.

Premium members now have unlimited access to all emoticons and animations, and can change the color of their chat messages.

Also, received mails do not expire for premium members, and they can invite their buddies or other users in their personal home room.

Furthermore, we made it even easier to gain premium membership status:

First, we now support ELV as payment method.

Second, and even more important, we just started a “Invite a friend” promotion – for each successfully invited friend, you gain 1 day premium membership for free.

This is only active for the next couple of days, so spread the word now!

We included an animated intro explaining the main features of AT.LANT.IS: