• Published:January 6th, 2009
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Erepublik V1, Internet, Goodies

• Published:January 3rd, 2009
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Erepublik V1, Improvements, Goodies

 This Insider article was quite good, so I had to publish it in the blog too.

After considering the achievements of 2008 in the last article, we’ve decided to share our challenges for the first half of 2009. The priorities in the near future are:

- Improving the experience of citizens. The existing modules will be improved in order to make them more easily understood by new citizens and also to provide a better overall eRepublik experience.
- New citizen laws. The new set of laws will replace the eRepublik 10 laws we have now and it will bring a more complete coverage of the events that are taking place in the New World.
- Visual improvements. Usability and game experience can be upgraded by improving several visual aspects of the New World. This process will be a constant challenge for our team throughout the year.
- Tools for general managers. Yes, the inclusion of the famous company statistics is one of our top priorities as it has been one of the most highly requested modules by the community.
- API system. A teaser of the eAPI was released last year and can be found here. The deadline for this complex project is approaching fast and our developers are working full-speed on bringing this new product to life.
- Translation in other languages. No web project is cool enough without being translated into other languages. The first steps were done and 2009 will bring new languages to the New World
- Moderator module. This community module will help citizens perform moderation tasks. As the eRepublik community is a fast-growing one, these types of tools are highly needed in order to provide a more complete and timely moderation.
- A cool eRepublik map. While the wars are developing fast, the map of the New World is constantly changing and a cool system is needed in order to display the new borders of the eRepublik countries.
- Citizen ads. The possibility to promote your party or your company in eRepublik is something our team is very keen about, therefore ads regarding the entities in the New World will be one of our challenges in 2009.
- eRepublik shop. T-shirts, eRepublik passports and badges will be fun things to have this new year.
- Add new countries. After Slovenia and Croatia, several other countries will be added constantly in eRepublik. The next one will be announced here.
- War improvements. Improving the current war module is one of our main challenges and with the feedback received from you, we shall make the proper changes regarding this module.
- Customization. Citizen / game customization is something we will start adding in small increments throughout the year.
- Newsletters. One of the tools that will help citizens keep up to date with the latest news around the New World.
- Adviser system. The tool used in beta will be back in V1, but Plato will have a more complete and fun coverage of what’s happening in eRepublik.
- Poll system. The poll system shall be used by parties, organizations and other entities in the New World and our team will use it to have a more complete view of the citizen needs.
- A new way to add improvements. Starting February the changes will be uploaded only once a month and announced at least a few days before hand.

New communication tools for citizens and improving the existing ones are also among our priorities. Along all of these front-end features, many other improvements will be made to the modules that are not visible by the citizens as these back-end modules help our team respond quickly to your needs.

All of these priorities are just a glance of what we expect in the next few months, several other features will be added in time. Remember to keep an eye on the eRepublik updates topic, the place where the new modules, features and improvements will be announced on a regular basis.

A Happy New Year To All Of You!!!

• Published:December 20th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Erepublik V1, Internet, Meetings

Last week was all about LeWeb for a few of us at eRepublik (and for me it’s been more like the last couple of months).  After winning the jury prize for best European startup at last year’s LeWeb, we decided to return to re-introduce everyone to the New World as it is today.  What a few days was.  It started with our arrival on Monday to get everything set up - which included getting our booth ready.  What an impressive booth we had - it lit up the entire room of booths with its towering white walls and screens running images of the game.  People flocked to our booth full of curiosity to learn what eRepublik was and how to get involved.  To introduce folks to the game we had an eRepublik newspaper including some intriguing news articles from the game, and also passed out eRepublik passports with LeWeb visas.  What was especially timely was the current war declared by the USA, UK, Canada and Sweden on France - certainly intriguing news for a lot of the French attendees.  It was so refreshing to interact and share the game with so many new people all at once and speak with them about their impressions and thoughts about the game.  Overall, people were tremendously fascinated with the concept and eager to get into the New World and check it out themselves.  We were all tremendously exhausted, but very happy and thankful to have had the opportunity to share eRepublik with so many people, face-to-face.  We met a lot of really sharp people and had some very intriguing conversations about the game.  It was a great time, but now it’s back to work!

• Published:December 4th, 2008
• Comments:1 Comment
• Category:Erepublik V1, Erepublik World

• Published:November 26th, 2008
• Comments:5 Comments
• Category:Erepublik V1, Erepublik World

When I pitch eRepublik, one of the things I insist on is the fact that since its browser based and doesn’t require a download, one of the great things about it is you can play it anywhere from any device. I personnlay play it a lot on my iphone and my new bbry bold (better than the iphone by the way). But I never expected some would play it this way! Tks Lint for the pic! 

• Published:November 20th, 2008
• Comments:1 Comment
• Category:Erepublik V1, Goodies

One year, wow… what a journey! Today we’ll do an analysis of how our team looked when Beta was launched versus how life is at our offices today.

From a tiny room in the Bucharest office that we had when we launched eRepublik beta, to an entire floor for the main headquarters and an office in Madrid.

From one of the famous laptop-made videos by Alexis, to a video made by George with a professional video camera. Here is the beta video as well as the one created a few hours before the V1 launch

From the five team members we had one year ago, to more the than 25 that we have today.

From only one team member that could play soccer, to an incredible team (that’s what we think anyway) of five players. We’re competing against the Electronic Arts soccer team in a local championship composed of other companies.

From only one girl on our team, to four girls. We know that we can do better in this area.

From just a crazy idea by George, to a winner of the FOWA startup contest (link ).

From the developers using a poor ticketing system a year ago, to using the complete and professional module that we have now.

From one team member recruited from the eRepublik community last March, to a full team of six members. These numbers will increase a lot next year with the new community moderator plan that I am preparing.

From the unbalanced teams we had in Medal of Honor and Age of Empires 2 marathons each Friday evening, to the more than three competitive teams that we have now.

From no broken stuff at the office, to four broken chairs, three smashed notebooks and two wrecked relationships between our staff members and their girlfriends.

We’ll be back shortly with an anniversary article in the Insider, but instead from the community perspective.

Hope you enjoyed your time playing eRepublik as much as we did developing it. For sure we are here to make your future eRepublik experience better.

• Published:November 14th, 2008
• Comments:3 Comments
• Category:Erepublik V1, Awards, In the press

This past month has been really crazy at eRepublik with all the team working round the clock to optimize V1.  I wanted to update you all though to let you know about our recent trip to FOWA as it was pretty rewarding.

We were really thrilled to be selected by Mike from TechCrunch UK and Ryan from Carsonified and FOWA for their European Start Up pitch competition. We were chosen with five other finalists who posted a 60 second pitch online. In a previous blog post, on my personal blog, I go over the unusual circumstances of how I posted ours from my hospital bed.

We were thrilled to participate, especially because the panel of judges was exceptional, including: Jason Calacanis, Mike Butcher, Ryan Carson and Brent Hoberman. As soon as we found out that Brent was on the judging panel we contacted Ryan and offered to retire from the competition, luckily for us, Ryan solved that issue by removing Brent´s vote for our specific case. (Disclosure: Brent is a friend and angel investor in eRepublik).

Having to pitch in 60 seconds a company that you and your team have been working on non stop for the past 18 months in front of hundreds of people from the industry and a very smart group of judges is super nerve wracking. But it’s an experience I really recommend, the great training and exposure from participating as well as the questions and feedback we got from the judging panel have proven extremely useful. Of course winning the competition was also quite a nice feeling and didn’t hurt for all the stuff we are doing behind the scenes :o)

You can see the video here, you can use the timeline shortcut if you just want to see the eRepublik part.

Alexis

• Published:October 12th, 2008
• Comments:317 Comments
• Category:Erepublik V1, Improvements, Goodies, Erepublik beta

Dear Citizens,

As many of you already know, the 14th of October will be the pre-launch of Erepublik V1 to our existing community of BETA users. This will be followed by the official launch on the 21st when we begin to actively share V1 with the outside world (press 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