Crystal Empire Games is a development studio created in June 2008 after the announcement of the Europa Engine Licensing Program by Paradox Interactive. The unique strength of this studio is that the members come from all around the world, joining their talents and experience in the long-term Europa Engine-based For the Glory project. Many team members have been active in the Paradox Interactive community for years, contributing mods and tools dedicated to the company's games.
This is just the beginning of a new chapter for the team and represents a higher level of structured cooperation between passionate people to give the best possible experience to players.
Our team:
Philippe has 20 years of experience in programming including 10 years leading teams (and not only dev ones). His last professional activity was CEO for a little e-learning company created in 2004. He quit for personal reasons at the end of 2007, just in time for the Europa Engine Program announcement!
He played EU2 for several years (and EU1 before) and being bored with vanilla, decided to try AGCEEP, the most popular user modification, in March 2005. He was hooked... and decided to actively participate and thus create an account on Paradox forum (having previously onyl been just a lurker). Based on the merits of his posts and proposals he was invited to join the AGCEEP High Council in September 2005. He then spent his free time helping to enhance the mod by using semi-professional methods for its maintenance and quality control.
FTG has been full time work for him since June 2008. He enjoys managing a long-distance project with passionate people all around the world.
Michael discovered EU2 in the spring of 2003, when he and his brother were looking through a small game shop in the mall for something resembling Risk, which was the best game they knew at the time. They thought EU2 looked promising — little did they know that it would be much, much more than they had bargained for. They released a mod in early 2004 called "The Historical Fantasia: After the Flood", or simply "After the Flood". It was intended to follow human history after Noah's Ark; but there were many things that couldn't be implemented with the EU2 engine.
While studying computer engineering in university, he spent his summers practicing his programming skills: writing utilities to help in modding EU2 and later EU3. His largest project was a save game and history file viewer/editor for EU3 (imaginatively titled EU3 Save Game and History Viewer/Editor); since moving to SourceForge in fall 2007, it and its EU4 successor have been downloaded over one hundred thousand times.
He also wrote a program to generate HTML documentation of EU2's often-complex event chains (the results of which can be browsed here), which is how he became acquainted with YodaMaster.
When asked what he would be doing if he were not developing For the Glory, he says that he would be playing it.
Jean-Marc was a researcher in micropaleontology and more recently a network administrator. He greatly assisted the team to help in the last steps of the project before release; organizing the beta-testing in the infrastructure offered by Paradox. He also translated the game in French and quality controlled many of the tiny details.
His hobbies include Paradox Games since EU1 with days and weeks and months spent on EU2 and Doomsday. Willing to give back some of what Paradox Games offered him, he helped in several beta-tests, EU3 and add-ons and EU:Rome+Vae Victis. He has tinkered a bit with EU2, Railroad Tycoon 2 and the Operational Art of War, with modifications forthcoming.
Kyle purchased EU2 when it first came out and fell in love. Interested in the game's ability to portray history (and alternate history), he got involved in one of the early mod projects, the Events Exchange Project (EEP) and has been involved in modding ever since.
By trade he's a market researcher and went to university to study psychology. His secret (or not so secret) passion has always been for history; spending a brief period at Oxford studying the life and times of Elizabeth I of England.
Joakim is an art director; making logos, graphical profiles, websites, print, etc by day and modding EU/Paradox graphics by night. He loves history which is exemplified by his hobby as a heraldic artist. He has been a part of Paradox universe since the days of Svea Rike but the game that really made him a fan was, of course, Europa Universalis.
Over the years he's been involved in several graphic mods, small and big ones, both for the EU series and other Paradox games. Being part of the FTG-team allows him to give back something to the game and community that has provided him so much joy over the years. He is quite proud to be labeled a "Paradoxian".
Bernd originally worked in the photo business. With 'classical' photography mostly being taken over by digital technology, he became increasingly interested in techniques dealing with computer graphics, for example in 2d image processing or in 3d modelling and animation. He is mostly a fan of turn-based strategy games and did extensive modding for games of the Civilization series.
He discovered Paradox games like EU2 and HOI2 relatively late, but was soon amazed by the way history was incorporated into these games, and the unique playing depth they offered. For him EU2 is still the classic Paradox title. Later, he started to make graphic mods for games using the Europa Engine, producing sets of unit sprites for HOI2, Victoria, and various interface graphics for CK.
Stefan graduated with a computer engineer degree from the Danish Technical University in 2008. He has been a Paradox game fan since a high school friend of his introduced him to Europa Universalis I. Since then, he has bought almost every game they have made. He has been tinkering with all of the games since the release of EU2, sharing his modifications with his friends. He participated as a beta tester for Victoria and as contributer for its Victoria Improvement Project mod.
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