A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I played with spaceships.
Last week, I was waiting at a garage for my car to be fixed.
These two unrelated events just collided in a joyously productive way, leading to the start of a creative project fifteen years in the making.
In the same week NASA sent a crew of four to the moon and back, I was inspired to put an imaginary crew into my old internet spaceships, thanks to a new EVE Online podcast I stumbled across, hosted by two of my old gaming blogger compatriots.
Listening to Rixx Javix (aka Bryan Ward) and Crazy Kinux (aka Dave Perry) talking about the evergreen online internet spaceship phenomenon, EVE Online, triggered a wave of creative nostalgia in me.
Now in an unprecedented third decade of leading-edge massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming, the dystopian sci-fi and grand social experiment EVE Online was the muse that began my writing ‘career’ (more of an intermittent side-quest than a career, but hey, I’ll still be picking a lane until I die). EVE was a game I played compulsively from 2003-2014ish, and I earned my blogging stripes writing (and podcasting) about my experiences, thoughts, and ideas.
The growing EVE blogging community of the 2000s owed much to the then ‘Blogfather’, Crazy Kinux (or CK), who very much unified dozens of disparate writers into a community with regular blog ‘banter’ discussions, encouraging a cross-pollenation of readership and inspiring more would-be bloggers, like myself and more notably, Rixx Javix, who took blogging to new heights with endless creative art projects and more, not to mention his incredible staying power to still be delivering content without interruption two decades later.
However, I digress; back to spaceship crews and AI.
Recently, I’ve been investing a lot of energy into embracing AI, using it to work out how to fix the washing machine, plan my next career step, and make a game about drunk dwarfs brawling with mummies.
Game design has always been a passion of mine, and often my EVE blogposts would include ideas that I wanted to see integrated into the game.
One concept I really wanted to see was evidence of life aboard these grand spaceships that players flew, fought, explored, and traded in through EVE’s galaxy of New Eden. Even the smallest ship in EVE is the size of a commercial airliner, with many of them much larger.
EVE’s deep lore contains many references to ship crews, and the ship designs indicate crew existence with windows and decks. However, the game design elegantly sidesteps any gameplay need to manage crew complexities by having players take on the role of a god-like ‘capsuleer’ with the technological power to control massive vessels with minimal staff. Any actual crew in-game remains abstract.
That didn’t stop me from exploring the idea exhaustively over many thousands of words (for more detail than you’ll ever need, see links beneath this article), perhaps in the naive hope EVE’s developers might read it and think, ‘hey, that’s a good idea – let’s do it!’.
Back then, circa 2012, I even considered the idea of making a browser-based bolt-on game that linked to the API data that EVE Online sends out to third-party apps typically used to monitor characters or in-game market prices. Sadly, as a career healthcare professional and family man, I lacked the technical nous or the time.
Then cometh the era of AI and suddenly, I can vibe-code my dreams!
Last Thursday, I came home from the garage, still listening to CK describing to Rixx his return to the universe of EVE. Leveraging my experience of developing Tavernkeeper with agentic engineering, I pointed Claude at my old blogposts, asked for a summary, and set about using that as a foundation to build a design framework for EVE Crews.
By late afternoon, I’d managed to link a rudimentary browser-based crew simulation (for one ship type) with online persistence to EVE Online’s ESI (EVE Swagger Interface) API data outputs.
My ship now had a full complement of officers and crew with an executive officer who ‘reports’ directly to the player-capsuleer as gameplay loops triggered by EVE Online activity trigger narrative events in EVE Crews.
Over the next few days, I fell deep into a development rabbit hole, using Claude and Gemini to assist in analysis, development and execution of many planned features at incredible pace. Suggestions from EVE’s online community (shoutout to @JanesSignal for the idea to use gamelogs to overcome some of the challenges around identifying combat damage) helped shape some features.
Now at Garage-Podcast Day +4 and EVE Crews is able to breathe life into most of EVE’s hundreds of ships, with lore-accurate crew numbers fighting a battle of attrition, morale and loyalty against the cold brutality of life in space.
There’s plenty more on the roadmap ahead, but further development has paused until Wednesday as I’ve burned through all my Claude usage tokens (even though I spent a little more on extra usage – but that’s a dangerous game I can’t afford to be doing regularly).
The pause has given me the opportunity to plan next steps in more detail, and write this blogpost. Also, I should probably look into how to roll this out to the community for some alpha testing or somesuch.
There’s only so much bug hunting I can do alone.
EVE Game Design and Crew Discussion Posts from a Bygone Era: