@podcat asked me to prepare a Dev Diary from a Project Lead perspective...
Quick background on me: I came on as Project Lead for HOI4 shortly after the game was released, last summer. That’s my perspective. I speak from a expansion-development point of view, and our work going forward.

The purpose of today’s Dev Diary is to give you a little insight into our development process.
Why we fix some bugs and leave others... How we decide what goes into the next expansion... and more.


Imagine, if you will, a crowded bar
Imagine all the customers screaming out their orders at once, to a single hard-working bartender.

How many words do you think the bartender will be able to make out, over the collected noise of the crowd?
How many drink orders do you think he will he be able to get right?

If you answered “none”, you’d probably be close to the truth.

My job, if I’d been working in that bar, would be to to organize a queue-system that works.
To move things along and make sure that people get what they want, as quickly as possible.

As project lead at Paradox; it’s my job to make sure that our players get what they want.
Best possible value in the game, within the shortest possible amount of time.

Here is a super condensed version of how the team and I go about making this happen.


The Design Process
First, within the team; the designer speaks for the players. They’re the one that decide what the team should do.
(Game director @podcat and game designer @Pallidum , in our case.
Continuing with the bar analogy; they’re the people who have a feel for the market and decide what goes on the drinks menu.)

New content to keep players engaged and happy... Weaknesses in the game that needs to be addressed... A balanced mix of all that good stuff is collected together in a “design document”.

The document explains the vision for each new feature, or fix, that goes with a new expansion. It essentially serves as a specification, or commission for work to be done, for the team.


How do we decide what new features and fixes go into an expansion?
The designers base their decisions on what goes into the design document, on, for example:

• Do the features fit into the overall theme of the expansion?
  (This also goes for bugfixes where we prefer to work by theme. For example Air or Naval).
• Do we hit a good mix of paid features and free features?
  (A lot of this is decided on how difficult things are to implement and their impact on the game’s balance.)
• Data we collect on player behavior.
  That data is analyzed and lead to new features or fixes.
• We have a database full of suggested improvements.
• Not to mention bugs that we prioritize and work off, in priority order.
• We also closely monitor mainly this forum, and (to a lesser degree) other HOI-communities, in case something pops up. Both bugs or inspired posts in the suggestion forum.

(For the love of God, YES! We saw the forum bug report.)


How do we choose which bugs to fix? (A bug’s journey from the bug forum to being fixed)
As I mentioned; we have a big database with bugs, improvement ideas and feature-suggestions.
(Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to our database.)

A lot of entries in this database, however, are related to the same underlying system. Doing an overhaul on that system will get rid of a whole bunch of bugs. These are things we prioritize.

A bug often starts out coming onto our radar by being reported, here, in our bug forum.
(I really want to stress this point, because we occasionally see people posting bug reports on reddit or other places. The odds of someone from Paradox stumbling over those reports and carrying them forward into our database are slim.)

The bug is transferred from here into our database. And we start looking into it, by analyzing it.
We need to know how frequent the problem is. How serious, and how quick it is to fix.
The more frequent or serious it is increases its chances of getting fixed. Soon.
If it also happens to be quick to fix… well, that’s just a win-win.

If a bug is serious, frequent and quick to fix and it’s still not being fixed… The most likely explanation to why we’re not fixing it ; is because we simply couldn’t fit it into our schedule.

It might help to understand this, if you…

Think of the development process as a single work day...
Serious things you hear about, before lunch, will get fixed before the day is done. For sure.
Then you might work on something else, with lower priority, for a while.
Until the next big problem pops up.
But, by then, you can’t start on it. Because you can’t get it all the way done, before you have to go home. It’ll have to wait until the next day.
So, in order to not waste precious time, you squeeze in something else that will fit.

This is how our development cycles work. Sometimes we simply can’t start on something and get it fixed, or improved, before the expansion has to ship.
(This also illustrates how sometimes things with lower priority get done when some higher prio stuff are left for later.)


Difficult judgement calls
Other bugs or suggestions are more up for debate.
Doing something that will make one group of people leap for joy - might seriously anger another group. We have to stay on top of that.


The big time-stealers
Not to mention that some requests, like improving AI, is a perpetual job that can’t be rushed.

As obvious as it is that an area needs work; some things are like hatching an egg. It takes the time it takes. No matter how many bodies you throw on the problem.

(Btw, this is how I imagine a Steam Summer Sale going. If Steam was a physical store.)


The Breakdown & Estimation process
Moving on: Once the design doc is complete… The team takes the design and breaks it down into bite-size tasks for coders, content designers, art, UX-design, sound etc.

When we have everything broken down into a list of tasks; we sit down together and “estimate” each task. Giving us an idea of how long the full feature will take to develop, once you add it all together.


How are deadlines and release-dates determined?
Paradox has a plan for how many expansions/DLCs we should release per year.

HOI4 release dates are determined based on: 1. that plan, 2. how quickly we can reach the desired sell-value of the release, and lastly 3. coordinated with specific dates that our marketing team have selected.
(More on this subject in next week’s Dev Diary.)


Can we make the expansion-design happen within the deadline?
After all features have been estimated; I can figure out if what we want to do is possible within the deadline. With the people at our disposal.

If yes: Huzzah!

If not: This is where I have to crush the designer’s hopes and dreams.

Splat!

We need to cut something in order to be able to finish on time.
This is something we discuss and agree on, together. While I gently pat their backs and hand them tissues.


What gets cut?
When cutting something I have to consider, for example:

• The desirability and priority of the feature.
• What people we have available.
  • How much, and what, each person can work on.
  • While not being blocked, or blocking, someone else.
• What features tie into other features.
  (If there is anything independent enough to cut cleanly.)

Sometimes laying this complex puzzle, trying to fit high priority pieces together, is trickier than trying to nail jello to a wall. Things slip and change constantly. This is the very essence and nature of development work.

In closing
Speaking of the nature of development work… While the example above mostly serves illustrate problems with communication, which is always a factor when people with different perspectives discuss something… I think it says something about how frequent certain development problems are; that a site exists where you can create your own project cartoon, like this one.

The issues that Paradox and HOI4 struggle with are the same problems that all IT projects, everywhere, grind their teeth over. It’s terribly complex work. Which is why, although the problems and risks are well known and can be anticipated and planned around, to a degree… they remain.

The silver lining, I think, is that while our problems are the same… we at Paradox have a hell of a lot of fun while working on them.

Next week, our Brand Manager will write a Dev Diary. Before handing the baton back to podcat.

Don't forget to tune into World War Wednesday today at 16:00CEST on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive! To see podcat run Germany in massive co-op, with the other devs as generals.

 

[JerkyJerry]

People like the gifs.

Yeah, no

Thank God there is an ignore button!

 

[petertel123]

I have played for over thousands hours and that is Multiplayer, in multiple communities. That's what I base my opinion on. In fact, most HOI4 players don't even post here on the forums. People who post on here represent a tiny fraction of HOI4 active community. The declining rate of approval of the game on steam is also an indication of the bad development/dlc policy for HOI4.

You've played the game over a thousand hours and you dont like it? Dont you have something better to do than waste time on something you dislike?

 

[Kamikaze1]

+1 for Gifs from another lurker. I came for the info and stayed for the humor Thanks for this one, it was an interesting read and more that appropriate given the fact that new content needs tlc before unveiling. Like many on here I have my items I'd like to see improved, but I still enjoy the game and have faith where its headed. Some time ago I wanted to champion/inquire about choosing air equipment for wings and was surprised when @podcat answered my pm directly. Sometimes posting to a forum can feel hollow so I appreciated this unexpected response and haven't mentioned it since. No point in rehashing the same gripe when I know it's on the radar and I appreciated the time taken for the reply. Thanks again fellas.

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for a most excellent DD KimchiViking, always great to get an insight into the processes behind how my favourite game goes from the minds of Podcat and Pallidum through the coding and content of the team, past the watchful eyes of QA and out into the wild gaming yonder . Great work with the gifs and pics as well, got a good laugh from them .

I prefer not to have more breaks than we have to with diaries. I get that ppl preferably would want to get details on features etc, but rather than a break I hope people will find some *actual* development diaries interesting to read too.

Haha, love this post - people get a dev diary about a game's development, and then complain that it's not the dev diary they expected. How dare we get a dev diary on actual development!

What I wanna understand is... why EU4 gets an interesting DD every week but not HOI4? I really don't get it. Is HOI4 not a priority for Paradox?

Because EU4 has never had a dev diary on the development process (or dev diary breaks)..... Oddly enough, the devs workflow isn't designed around giving us 'new feature' diaries each week, but rather on producing the best possible game. Although I'm sure KimchiViking would have a new and interesting challenge if their job was managing the team with the aim of producing feature dev diaries every week instead of an actual game .

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...u4-development-diary-2nd-of-may-2017.1018557/

Glad to hear it! Unfortunately (and as expected by us) I think you're in a minority.
Most people want to hear about nothing but new cool stuff or fixes, rather than the actual development process. (Heaven forbid there is actual development talk in a development diary, right?)

As podcat said last week; those people will simply have to be patient.
We're starting on all of our big changes first. Which we can't show you yet, as they are time consuming to develop.
As @Gamer_1745 pointed out earler... it was either this or nothing.

At the very least this HoI4 fan appreciates that it was this (and that the dev diary was a great read, rather than "better than nothing"!) As for whether we're a minority though, you've got far more agrees and helpfuls than disagrees (it's just that folks that disagree tend to bellyache louder, but you don't need me to tell you that ).

yeah, when I checked after summer HOI4 was the most played (monthly players) of our strategy titles (cant touch that Skylines ). EU4 is currently beating us with like 1k players tho :'( it goes up and down a bit.

Nice work . EU4's pretty mature now - have you tried comparing players at the same time since development (so release month aligned data) - you should definitely do this if Johan gives out cake to the team that gets the most players or something like that *.

* Obviously, the number of players is not a sensible measure of how good a game is (or even how financially successful it is), I'm just being silly here .

Quite the disappointing dev daily if you ask me...It's a shame that a far amount of people who do this for free put a lot more work then this...Disagree or Agree all you want,it's how i feel.

It's good that you're honest with your feelings, but keep in mind that our emotions are evolved for hunter-gatherers in small tribal groups, and are much more geared towards instant or short-term gratification (which presumably works well for hunter-gatherers in small tribal groups, or we'd have been out-evolved by something else). However, in our somewhat more complex modern society, it can be of immense benefit to understand when our feelings are appropriate in the context they're in, and learn to adjust our emotional response accordingly (emotions, like muscles, can be trained, but as for both, most don't bother). As far as I'm aware, it's a much surer path to happiness than to have it slave to a system of feelings that's still pretty much stuck in the stone age.

Agree. This is NOT the Dev Diary as expected. It reflect the progress more on design phase and not yet has decision.

As others have posted in this thread, the only reason for not expecting a dev diary like this is not reading last week's DD - so even if you're not keen on how the game is actually developed, you've got last week's DD to enjoy instead .

 

[billcorr]

I see someone wants to be a Terry Gilliam!

Right.

Also, I see someone who also honors Douglas Adams.

(Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to our database.)

"Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

 

[astec]

I prefer not to have more breaks than we have to with diaries. I get that ppl preferably would want to get details on features etc, but rather than a break I hope people will find some *actual* development diaries interesting to read too.

I would rather have throwback dev diaries concerning HOI3 and the mechanics to the Sino-Japanese war and HOW you will translate those mechanics into HOI4. We don't need any sort of concrete images or definitive features. What we want is a glimpse into the CURRENT DEVELOPMENT progress. What is the point of making a dev diary if you are just writing about content that you finished a week ago and are already working on the next little blurb. This way maybe players can give some sort of feedback and get information about the game's general direction.

I KNOW for a fact that this DLC is concerning the pacific theater which would contain the two Chinas, Manchukuo, Philippines, Siam, and Japan. Naval refits and naval tactics (similar to land tactics cards) will be present as well as an actually FUNCTIONING pearl harbor event chain that could provoke an early war with Japan at the cost of losing a sizable amount of capital ships.

Also it is kind of strange that Japan does not have any research bonuses to 1940 naval invasion tech as it historically conducted large amphibious operations in Southeast Asia.

The Sino-Japanese war should have some sort of scorched earth mechanic or core defense bonus to simulate how Japan got bogged down in the vastness of China. The People's Republic of China should also get a relevant focus tree that unlocks powerful bonuses after the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese war to make the Chinese Civil War an actual challenge. Similarly a white peace event should be enforced if Japan manages to get pushed all the way out of Manchuria and into Korea as the humiliation of being defeated on land by the Chinese would surely cause them to abandon the venture (where is the fun in waiting to build a navy as China or abusing paratrooper mechanics to kill Japan).

Submarines should play a much larger role along with a more intuitive way to escort and kill convoys. Right now the convoy warfare stands at an all or nothing principle. Either the entire convoy is destroyed or all the submarines are destroyed by escorting destroyers.

Naval combat should be changed to a top down perspective to represent the shifting battlefield of the sea. Convoys could start grouped up as a long chain with several escorting destroyers and upon contact with submarines they could scatter in different directions with the escorts closing in on the submarines. This would ensure that some convoys would always get sunk by submarines but not all of them. Subs attacking from multiple directions could be a big threat (giving the wolfpack doctrine some actual use) with naval doctrine influencing how convoys are escorted and attacked. Also make it so that when you reset your resources the convoy efficiency is not also reset.

Supply convoys are currently unsinkable so it is impossible to starve island garrisons in the current iteration of the game.

 

[bitmode]

(Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to our database.)

Most regulars on the forums probably already figured that out

Making sure that new features or fixes don't throw off balance is always a big and planned part of everything we do.

Could you explain a bit how you define "balance" in terms of this game and how it's getting tested? In a game with singleplayer/multiplayer, where every country has different starting positions, many possible strategies and different (ahistorical) goals...

The more frequent or serious it is increases its chances of getting fixed. Soon.
If it also happens to be quick to fix… well, that’s just a win-win.

That last sentence sounds like the speed to fix something is secondary? I.e. let's say bug A is 12x more frequent/serious than bug B but takes 50x longer to fix. Which bug would you prioritize? So far when I reported bugs, I prioritized things that I think are clear-cut and easy to fix.

 

[Axe99]

Naval combat should be changed to a top down perspective to represent the shifting battlefield of the sea. Convoys could start grouped up as a long chain with several escorting destroyers and upon contact with submarines they could scatter in different directions with the escorts closing in on the submarines.

Making a historically plausible top-down naval display for the range of situations that could come up in WW2-era naval warfare (which, with aircraft playing a key part, would involve a top-down 'battle map' hundreds of kilometres across) would be a huge amount of work (just ask the people developing Rule the Waves 2 - and they've got Rule the Waves as a base to build off). From a historically plausible gameplay perspective we'd likely get better results if things moved away from a 'pseudo-tactical' display altogether (we don't have a tactical display for land or air, for good reason, and it would be impractical to give any tactical naval control in the context of broader gameplay outside the naval battle, even if the devs had the resources to make it work) and work on functions that give more historically plausible results - although that's just my 2 cents. If the devs did want to make a proper overhead tactical naval combat minigame, I'd be very happy, but that's not really what HoI's about.

As an aside, many convoys tended to move in squares rather than strung out as a line (it allowed for a more efficient allocation of escorts - often one to each corner of the square, once there were enough escorts to manage that). Also, as far as I know (and I've read a little bit on this), they also generally didn't scatter when attacked by subs (scattering wasn't necessarily a good thing when it came to submarines - see PQ17 - and was a tactic more commonly used against surface warships)

 

[BogMod]

I am inherently suspicious of any design process that didn't include getting drunk at some point but always curious to see the inner workings of a creative process for a studio like this. Made for a neat read even if nothing didn't jump out as a surprise.

 

[Olanov]

Thanks for the diary, made for a very interesting read. It's all too easy for us as consumers to sometimes forget it's not quite so simple to work on video games.

 

[Sanny]

So let's look at the steam reviews then?

Overall: 78%
Recent: 83%

A few questions pop into my head:

• How is 78% -> 83% a declining rate?
• How is either the remaining 22% or remaining 17% that posted negative reviews "most HOI4 players"?

It is declining though, last time I posted about it after Together For Victory, it was sitting at 85% Overall which was worrying for a Paradox game. And this was before all the price increase nonsense that led to a lot of review scores dropping across the board (a good portion of fans have changed their reviews back to positive now after the price reversal). Also the recent score only takes into account reviews posted in the last 30 days which isn't a good indicator at all. The only thing that has increased dramatically is the playerbase funnily enough and I suppose that's what matters at the end of the day. Hearts of Iron IV has had the lowest Steam score of any PDS game since Steam reviews began.

 

[107zombiekiller]

@podcat

please
fix the event for germany getting their half of poland from russia using the MR pact if russia eats poland instead this patch
they get everything aside from the 2 provinces that poland nabs from czech and its been driving me insane and stopping me from doing a more peaceful germany game since you introduced it because i hate the russian having that land right there for no reason at all
im pretty sure i made a bug report a long time ago on it now (though i can hardly remember anymore so who knows if i actually did) and ive posted several other times about it in the comments for a few dev diarys
please fix it

that aside nice diary, much better then not getting anything because a new expantion is in the works like last time, i hope for great things
and for germany to get all of poland when russia honors the MR pact
but i digress

 

[Misaka_Complex]

Is this really a DD or a meme thread?

 

[Nicolas-]

You've played the game over a thousand hours and you dont like it? Dont you have something better to do than waste time on something you dislike?

Flawed logic. I played almost on a daily basis in the six months that followed the release. I liked the game. If you tried to read, I'm mainly complaining about the dlcs not the core game. Just because someone enjoyed a game in its early development stages doesn't mean they will necessary like the state of the game at a later stage. I stopped playing the game in February or so, after I realized that nothing good was going to be added to the core game.

 

[Archangel85]

I would rather have throwback dev diaries concerning HOI3 and the mechanics to the Sino-Japanese war and HOW you will translate those mechanics into HOI4. We don't need any sort of concrete images or definitive features. What we want is a glimpse into the CURRENT DEVELOPMENT progress. What is the point of making a dev diary if you are just writing about content that you finished a week ago and are already working on the next little blurb. This way maybe players can give some sort of feedback and get information about the game's general direction.

If we did this it would just be a repeat of the Romania dev diary, i.e. a complete meltdown.

I KNOW for a fact that this DLC is concerning the pacific theater which would contain the two Chinas, Manchukuo, Philippines, Siam, and Japan. Naval refits and naval tactics (similar to land tactics cards) will be present as well as an actually FUNCTIONING pearl harbor event chain that could provoke an early war with Japan at the cost of losing a sizable amount of capital ships.

Wow, I didn't know this and I work here! Thanks for letting us know!

 

[spartansociety]

Is this really a DD or a meme thread?

 

[Arkhis]

The only thing that has increased dramatically is the playerbase funnily enough and I suppose that's what matters at the end of the day. Hearts of Iron IV has had the lowest Steam score of any PDS game since Steam reviews began.

I suppose that shows how irrelevant Steam reviews are. Don't look at the score, just read the longest and best written reviews, as these can give you an idea of what the game actually is (same with metacritic or any other review aggregator). Also, steam has a binary scoring system, which is incredibad for any form of decent reviewing. I mean, I'd detract points in a out of 10 score for the fact PDX seems to go out of their way to make the game difficult for colourblind people to play (I know they don't, but it's pretty bad), but how can you reflect that in a steam review?

@podcat @KimchiViking ; please, I don't think it should be up to the modding community to make this game accesible to colourbind people (thanks to the guy who made the mod for it, you a champ).

 

[MadlockUK]

Another vitally important thing for us is resource management. For that I use other tools.

Do you not use JIRA's time management or maybe a plugin? There's quite a few though at the moment our development team isn't mature enough to start doing this with the time estimates due to various contract issues. (most are contractors)

Also, @KimchiViking , if you guys are using JIRA and trying to determine new features et al. Would it be helpful to put issues out to us to vote on? Obviously you'd have to obfuscate the comments and everything for anonymous users, but might help inform that. Or do you use this feature internally?

Lastly, is your JIRA linked up to a code management tool? (e.g. GitHub)

Feel free to tell me to jog on, but it's quite interesting. I won't lie you probably have my dream job as I've been doing Software PMing for a few years and in mostly dry areas. If you''re hiring let me know haha

 

[Bratyn]

If you''re hiring let me know haha

https://career.paradoxplaza.com/jobs

 

[podcat]

Nice work . EU4's pretty mature now - have you tried comparing players at the same time since development (so release month aligned data) - you should definitely do this if Johan gives out cake to the team that gets the most players or something like that *.

* Obviously, the number of players is not a sensible measure of how good a game is (or even how financially successful it is), I'm just being silly here .

Generally we do cakes by team once we hit certain milestones :3

Could you explain a bit how you define "balance" in terms of this game and how it's getting tested? In a game with singleplayer/multiplayer, where every country has different starting positions, many possible strategies and different (ahistorical) goals...

We dont really balance from a MP perspective but focus on SP, especially the more historical paths. Although we are slowly switching that around to care more about the alt history path difficulty etc. In general there are different balance situations we look at:
1) QA chimes in on if mechanics feel worth it, if stuff isnt worth using etc or if they are overpowered as part of each sprint, we reserve time for dealing with this as iteration time for this on each sprint. They also bring up strategies you can use to cheese ai etc (of course this stuff never ends)
2) Making sure the game follows historical flow on all ai with historical ai on. For that we run 20-30 games and compare statistics. When stuff breaks we take a look as to why. If the reason for the outcome being wierd is a mistake by AI (say germany is losing vs soviets, is it because it made a tactical messup, because it bled too much vs the french or because its production is not up to it) we look at fixing that. If there is no mistake we look at overall balance and adjust factory counts, starting techs, division template focus and the like.

A lot of good balance feedback also come from betas who play a lot of MP games of the kind we dont really at the office (very slow, very heavy use of manual controls etc). Although we always need to take the AI into consideration when balancing too as tailoring for that playstile will make things harder for it.

We also have certain vaguer design goals for balance that we slowly move towards, but require larger changes. For example making early wars less attractive for Germany which comes down to speed of growth vs other powers etc

That last sentence sounds like the speed to fix something is secondary? I.e. let's say bug A is 12x more frequent/serious than bug B but takes 50x longer to fix. Which bug would you prioritize? So far when I reported bugs, I prioritized things that I think are clear-cut and easy to fix.

We specially mark "quick fixes" so they are easier to find and fix. When I prioritize I generally bump easy to fix stuff one level up. As for priority its a tradeoff between frequency and how how much it blocks players. An animation bug that happens every game may still get less priority than fixing a war merge bug that breaks the players WW2. MP and non-windows platforms tend to get lower priority in general as they affect a lot less people etc. We try to aim for bang for buck (also to go with the patch theme as we found it to be a lot easier to focus heavily on one area for testing and fixing rather than just spread stuff around priority)

I am inherently suspicious of any design process that didn't include getting drunk at some point but always curious to see the inner workings of a creative process for a studio like this. Made for a neat read even if nothing didn't jump out as a surprise.

Most of the serious design work is done with some form of alcohol involved Brainstorming->detail design matches roughly: whisky->wine->coffee scale

fix the event for germany getting their half of poland from russia using the MR pact if russia eats poland instead this patch

Correct me if I''m wrong, but that only happens if they sign the pact right? why wouldnt both sides honor the pact? or am I getting this wrong

Lastly, is your JIRA linked up to a code management tool? (e.g. GitHub)

Only softly (ppl write revisions and such in jira). We have been looking into more integration with https://www.atlassian.com/software/fisheye but the judgement is still out on that one a bit.