Meet the Team — Húni

Building virtual online worlds is no small feat, let alone building hugely successful ones like the space MMORPG EVE Online, which has been running for almost 20 years. And what better way to build an ever-evolving online MMO than hiring some of the people responsible for the success of EVE?

Meet Húni Hinrichsen, Senior Software Engineer of Civitas, and one of the few people who witnessed and built EVE Online from the ground up.

— Giorgio ‘Error 404’ Crosali

Welcome to Civitas! Can you tell our community who Húni is?

Hihi and thanks a bunch! I am Húni (aka TomB) and just joined the team a few weeks ago — now you know who Húni is, it is me :Þ

But if you want to know more… Then I’m 1,96m tall (6”4), dark hair, blue eyes, and got 3 tattoos. I’m also married, got like an army of kids and was forced to buy a minibus to fit them all. I’m also really old and stuff, but I was once young!

When I was young I used to play games as if I was paid for it … which is actually how it was! From competing in Quake (Iceland national team representing) to CS, but mainly staying alive by exploiting MMOs and ebaying the sweets (don’t tell anyone).

Then in 1998 came the evil gaming industry and offered to pay me consistent money for playing, 18 years old, hating school and loving games I joined a newly formed company called CCP, the makers of EVE Online. I made games with them for 22 years in total with 2 years in between working at a company that makes hi-tech killing machines — so that’s why I’m old today.

My first job title in gaming was “researcher”, where I was “responsible” for buying and playing games and just noting down cool things (I still miss my first job…). Once we had a runnable engine I became Lead QA, moved to game design shortly after when we needed game mechanics. Became Lead Game Designer in 2005, joined production in 2010.

Now on to my current role! Weird thing is that I actually always thought that programming was just a “well paid but dead boring” job and it wasn’t until 2012 that I started fiddling with unity to minimize game mechanic iterations for a group of engineers. Then I realized that programming was actually damn creative — and today the thought of a complex & hard-to-reproduce bug is just like playing a game of sudoku! Or maybe it’s just me, the old gamer, making a game out of everything? Who knows! Anyway, I became a software engineer in 2013 and have been there ever since!

What are the responsibilities of a software engineer, and what’s the most rewarding thing about it?

Write lines of words that look gibberish-like, but somehow become a computer game — MAAAAAGIC!

For large projects the responsibilities of software engineers and what rewards each is vast. For example one might be focused on tools for designers and artists and could feel accomplished seeing the smiles on the faces of their co-workers when utilizing new features that allow them to do new things or faster — while another handles networking or data persistence, where performance is of utmost importance and gets rewarded when releasing a product with no issues.

But in general, what makes software engineering so enjoyable for me is that it’s a profession that evolves non-stop and I seriously doubt that I will ever feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over again.

You spent over two decades working on EVE Online, which is probably longer than any other member of Directive Games. What aspects of Civitas convinced you to switch flags finally?

Civilization is one of my all time favorite games, so making a game that resembles it is kind of a good way of convincing me, right? There were multiple other factors, like the fact that the Civitas team already had old friends onboard, that does help quite a bit!

As someone who worked so long on such a unique online world, do you feel it’s a replicable experience? What’s the secret sauce to keep fostering a large-scale fictional universe?

Without doubt! Having gone through the creation from all aspects of game development it has permanently burned my brain with the thought-process of what can possibly make an experience for players last longer. But it’s still always a challenge when considering the need for chasing a world that is advancing in technology & creativity at incredible pace. On top of that we have people longing for a different experience based on lives constantly changing and also new generations of players joining the old and having experienced society and gaming in a completely different manner.

There are multiple factors to consider for keeping a big game alive, the classic example of preventing player boredom with continuous content development in a theme park game vs. ultra-focus on how players can and will utilize game mechanics in a sandbox game. But in my most honest opinion, what is most important for any secret sauce (for anything) simply requires the chefs to love the sauce and wanting to make it the best darned sauce it can ever be. So… love thy sauce!

What are your favorite games and why?

Civilization I, the first strategic game that had evolutionary elements that completely changed the experience throughout the game, resulting in phenomenal replayability! Like not rolling over Gandhi because you think he’s such a nice guy, then realizing the mistake when you see that he simply advanced to nukes and just dropped one on your cities. Let me tell you, Gandhi is not a nice guy… Civilization IV comes close due to modding, especially the Fall From Heaven mod. I seriously hope the creators get to remake it one day.

Ultima Online … the combination of social & PVP elements, first of its kind on a large scale. Nothing comes close to the feeling of belonging to a group of online friends (even if you’ve never met or even seen them) and waging war against another such group. I once stayed up for 3 days straight playing that thing, until I passed out in my chair and woke up under my desk on the 4th day…

Lastly, what are your favorite hobbies when you are not busy creating or playing games?

Rock hounding! I loooooove finding pretty diamonds in nature… I’ve been obsessed with it since I was 4 or 5 years old, forced to spend all summers with my dad as a tour guide. After having seen everything in Iceland in a single summer I became bored and made rocks my hobby.

It only gets worse with age, now building a dungeon for my ever-growing arsenal of lapidary equipment, where I cut the pretties and polish and give them to people I care about, who obviously also love them, else they wouldn’t be my friends.

Also a note on pretty rocks is that when I took on cutting and polishing, I started seeing them as I see people — trying to find the inner beauty instead of the outer *corny heart emoji* — but no! It doesn’t mean that I’m going to start cutting up people…these are your thoughts of me, not mine!

Peace out!
Your friend, Húni

Want to know more about the Civitas team? Check our previous Meet the Team issues on our publication page: https://medium.com/playcivitas/tagged/meet-the-team