Dear Paradox,

My name is Rick Pierce and I’d like to work with you.

I am an independent game developer, amateur writer, graphic design artist, and professional web developer from the Seattle-area who is a fan of Paradox games. I am applying for the Freelance Content Designer or Content Designer position.

The first Paradox game I played was Europa Universalis II in 2002. A group of friends I knew from an internet discussion board were fans of the first and were very excited to see the sequel coming out. I picked it up on a whim, wanting to see what they were raving about, and was hooked. There was something fundamentally appealing about creating alternate history or trying to carve out a (relative) utopia for my people during the renaissance. History came alive for me.

Paradox Games Modding

Hearts of Iron IV

In anticipation of the release of Hearts of Iron IV, I began working on a modern day mod called Millennium’s Shadow. The mod would take place at the end of the millennium, with start dates in 1993 and 2001.

The mod’s changes included all new countries, dozens of new leader portraits, a custom province map with custom states, new map colors and a modern map font, various interface changes including event and news popup windows, and custom scripted events. The philosophy behind the mod was to give players a chance to change recent history, for better or for worse.

Unfortunately, this is one mod that I never released despite the amount of work I put into it. Other mods, such as the similarly named Millennium Dawn, filled the niche nicely. An uptick in my general responsibilities in early 2017 also interfered with the amount of time I could spend working on the mod as well. Eventually, I would like to take the assets I’ve created and turn them into addons for other already-published modern day mods.

Victoria II

The mod I'm probably best known for is the Divided We Stand mod for Victoria II. The mod focuses on an alternate 1861 start where the United States, Canada, and Mexico have broken into various states and regions, balkanizing the North American continent. Because I needed to modify the pops of these new nations en masse, I developed a web application with a friend to generate pop breakdowns quickly, and created batch files to generate custom game files in seconds.

In addition, I also contributed to the Modern Day Mod for Victoria II, supplying interface graphics and map changes. (The modern newspaper graphics made to look like websites were my favorite.)

Stellaris

I have a purely cosmetic mod for Stellaris on the Steam Workshop. It is a collection of various fictional and nonfictional emblems used by groups on Earth. There are over 170 included now, with plans to continue expanding in the future. My goal was to get the emblems to match as closely in style to the default emblems included in the game.

Cities: Skylines

Lastly, I wanted to give a quick shoutout to a building I created for Cities: Skylines. It is a 1:1 scale replica of the Columbia Tower, the tallest building in Seattle. When I first got started working in games I did a lot of 3D art, so it was a fun exercise to go back and create something in a three-dimensional space and share it with others.

Making Games

I make my own games as well, which I usually play with others in online communities, such as Something Awful or Reddit. These games aren’t as complex as something you might find in a store or on Steam, and many of the mechanics are processed manually, but they give me an opportunity to share my passion for game development with others.

History of the World

History of the World is what I would consider my “flagship” title and has been a game I’ve run multiple versions of for over 15 years. In it, players pick a location on the Earth to start a small civilization. They must then work to develop their military, research technologies, and build up domestic support. They begin in the stone age and progress into seven other ages that roughly represent the technological eras of history, including one that takes place in our future.

Every other nation is another player, and players must either work together or plot against each other to ensure that their civilization will stand the test of time.

As a player’s borders grow and friction arises with their neighbors, wars eventually erupt and alliances are formed along political, social, and religious lines. Toward the end of History of the World, players are given the power to wipe out all life through various military technology, ending the game prematurely. They must decide to work together—even as rivals—to ensure that existence (and the game) continues as the effective lethality of technology increases.

Moments: A Game of Consequence

In 2012, I developed a narrative-based game titled Moments: A Game of Consequence. The game was posted to a thread on the Something Awful forums disguised as a regular forum poster having discovered a mysterious floppy disk that contained a game. After successfully getting it to run on an old computer terminal, the poster then provided captures of the game, which was a story told in a “choose your own adventure” style prompt. Other users voted on which of the options to take, and the original poster went with the option most-picked.

The game itself was a story told in second-person, each of the options representing a moment in the main character’s life, from birth until death. As the protagonist, Ethan, aged, the decisions to be made became increasingly difficult. Eventually, bugs started appearing in the story and it was decided that through a series of choosing the most absurd options (as forum posters are wont to do) that Ethan was suffering from undiagnosed mental health issues. Players took the matter into their own hands, picking up on clues from the game to enter a debugging sequence that shattered the fourth-wall and sent the protagonist into a mental breakdown.

Many of the game’s players became attached to the character of Ethan, having grown up with him virtually over a year’s time. In late 2012, as the game approached the time period it was in real life, Ethan was tragically killed in a poor-choice decision. According to the parameters of the game when it began, there would be no save-scumming. As a writer, the emotional reaction on the forum was wonderful: everything from genuine sadness to heartfelt thanks. I, of course, made the big reveal at the end that the game was not real (though almost everyone was positive it wasn’t by that point anyway), but they still enjoyed the work put into it and appreciated the story.

To this day, I consider Moments one of my greatest successes.

The Chronology Division

I love time-travel and (unintentionally) creating alternate timelines by playing with the past. In 2015, I sat down and outlined a card game called The Chronology Division—based a series of short stories I wrote—in which you played as an officer trying to repair the timeline.

The game layout is similar to the game Chrononauts, in which all cards are placed in a line from earliest to latest across the table, randomly either on their A or B side. This represents the timeline. Players then take turns attempting to repair the timeline or working against other players to sabotage it using drawn decision cards.

Unfortunately a core mechanic, the timeline layout, is held as a patent by the creators of Chrononauts, who did not return my attempts to contact them.

Intended expansions and additions included focus on other nationalities, additional timeline events to the base game, earlier historical eras, and even a possible future era.

Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand is a play-by-post grand strategy forum game similar to History of the World. In this game, instead of commanding the technological and cultural development of a nation throughout history, players control a group of survivors struggling to reunite a collapsed North America in the wake of a global nuclear exchange. Its name is based on the old American motto “united we stand, divided we fall.”

This game preceded my Victoria II mod with the same name.

Players choose a faction ideology and work with others in their faction to spread and promote that ideology through whatever force they deem fit. It’s up to players to get along, where rifts can emerge in the factions and a faction can go to war with itself; or, a faction is unified in their ideology but find themselves spread too thin to be of any assistance to each other. The game is won when a single faction remains in play, whether those players have ushered a new era of prosperity for humanity or created a war-torn dystopia.

The Survivors

What would you do if you found yourself trapped in a small downtown apartment during the zombie apocalypse, high above the decaying streets and safe from the dangers below? But you had a spouse and child to protect? And that it had been a two weeks and you knew that no help was coming?

The Survivors was another play-by-post forum game, but this time players contributed by voting for specific actions that the main character would take. It told the story of one family’s escape from downtown Seattle to an evacuation zone to the north of the city. Decisions required making choices to go in different directions, engage in attacking zombies, or using supplies and tools found along the way.

Once infected, the choices became more distorted and nonsensical as the protagonist became more sick.

The story’s climax came when the protagonist sacrificed himself to prevent his family from getting infected, destroying a major bridge in the process and escaping to the evacuation zone before succumbing.

The story was heavily influenced by player participation, with no clear storyline in place before beginning the game. Sprites were drawn to accommodate the narrative as it unfolded. To date, it is the most interactive fiction I’ve ever produced.

Battalion Command

In 2016 a friend and I stumbled upon tabletop wargaming and were instantly hooked. We’ve since recruited a small group from our office that does weekly games in the evening after work. I especially enjoyed the “complicated” rule sets—the kind usually only found in video games—expressed in a tangible way. It’s a lot of fun to take an active role in generating the numbers the game uses to determine outcomes by rolling dice.

With an assortment of tabletop rules in mind, I began working on a ruleset for my own tabletop game called Battalion Command. The game pits two or more players in direct competition (or teams in competition) to eliminate each other or fulfill objectives, depending on the scenario chosen by the players before the game begins.

Players take control of a group of tanks (usually from 3 to 15) and give orders to the crew inside each tank (as outlined on a large playing card kept to the side of the board) to position those tanks, fire upon their opponents, and carry out special abilities. Crewmen inside may not always respond to a command ordered, may panic, and occasionally will perish or rout during battle.

In addition to modeling the individual crew operating each tank, the tanks themselves have unique attributes that can be activated. The weapon systems are also modeled, so that certain types of rounds can be loaded and used to destroy especially difficult opponents or “spot” tanks for aerial and artillery strikes. Right now the game focuses on the armored vehicles used during World War II and the early Cold War, but the goal is to incorporate the breadth of armored history, from the Great War to today.

While the core rules have been established, Battalion Command is still in a state of mechanics balancing to make sure it runs smoothly each time a game is played no matter what vehicles each player pits against each other. If you’d like to play a game, I’d be happy to share the beta rules!

Additional Qualifications

The Content Designer position description lists three points in the Additional Qualifications section:

Lead or management experience is a plus
Programming experience is a plus
Experience creating mods for Paradox Development Studio games is a major plus

We’ve already discussed the last point (modding) at some length, but I’m also presently employed as the team lead for the front-end development department.

In college, I learned to build websites as a means to facilitate bringing my website designs to life though my passion still remained in design. After the recession of 2008 hit, I began exploring other options and picked up some work focusing more on development than design.

I realized how much I loved it. By 2010, I was working full-time as a developer.

In 2012, I was promoted to team lead. The focus of my role changed somewhat as I was now responsible for more than just myself. I handled project management over multiple projects (working with the actual project and program managers), ensured my developers were happy, managed financials for my team, and still continued the day-to-day client work. I’m a big believer that a leader is most effective when they work side-by-side with their employees, showing them better ways to accomplish tasks and not being afraid to do the work.

I’d like to take a moment and address gender equality because it is important to me personally and it is specifically mentioned in the job posting. I believe it is important to you as well. I consider myself a feminist and an ally to achieving equality. As a team lead who was responsible for hiring, I am incredibly proud to say that of the 15 individuals I’ve hired, seven have been women. I consider myself lucky to be in an area where so many talented developers have congregated regardless of their gender or self-identity, allowing me to find them and including them on my team for the simple reason that they were the best suited for the position.

Some Other Ventures

As a fan, I’d love to say my entire life revolved around Paradox games, but obviously it doesn’t. (And I think you’ll agree that’s probably a good thing.) There are a lot of other things that I do in my spare time and I wanted to share a few of them.

Colorization

I’ve made a bunch of game mods and internet games that have attracted a small group of followers (most of who I now consider friends) but what I’m best known for is my work doing digital photo colorization.

In 2011, I was inspired by a post I saw on reddit showcasing a black and white photo that had color added to it by hand using Photoshop. I was really impressed by it, but a part of me wanted to “fix” it; meaning there were some flaws I thought I could update to look more realistic. I brought it into Photoshop and began to work on it, using color sampling and blending modes to give more depth to the colorized photo. And once I did some touch-ups, I realized that I could start from scratch. Since then, my work has been featured in many publications and media, including the BBC, NPR, The History Channel, and the Huffington Post, among others.

Fiction Writing

Four years ago I began writing fiction in earnest, starting with a series of short stories that I self-published online chronicling the case files of an Interpol police officer from 2044 who was responsible for protecting the timeline. She works in the field, meaning that when someone from the future goes back, she goes back as well and tries to stop them. Sometimes she's successful, and sometimes she has to improvise to minimize the damage.

Included is a sample from Achieving Serenity, the third story in the series:

It took Melissa twenty of her twenty-two minutes to find what she was looking for. A bulge on the back of a Norman Rockwell painting of two boys next to an ice-cream truck, the boys and the driver staring with exasperation at one of the boy’s fallen scoops of pink ice-cream. Taped to the back of the canvas was a small silver box that had to be the bomb. It looked innocuous. There were no protruding wires or timing systems or red sticks of dynamite. Melissa was a little disappointed at its blandness.

“Does this look like it’s it, Hal?” Melissa asked.

“I need a better look with my camera. Let me scan it,” Hal said. Melissa fetched the mobile device from her pocket, opened it up, and held it out in front of the silver box.

“It’s definitely a bomb,” Hal said. “This has to be it.”

Melissa was in a cold sweat and, now that the nuclear device was in her hand, she felt exhausted. “How do I disarm it?”

“You don’t,” Hal said.

“Excuse me?”

“You have ninety-two seconds left before it explodes. The construction indicates that it would need to be cut open and, unless you’re a lot stronger than I think, we’re out of time.” Hal was very motivational when it needed to be. “It was nice knowing you, Melissa.”

See?

She closed Hal and slipped it back into her breast pocket. “I’m not ready to give up yet,” she said.

“If you could build a rocket, you might be able to get it into orbit,” Hal suggested, its voice muffled. “It’s not big enough to have too much fallout. But that explosion might still trigger World War Three.”

“Not helpful, Hal,” Melissa said.

“Can’t dig fast enough to bury it, either.”

“Still not helping.”

“Can you get it to the ocean?”

“With a minute left?” Melissa asked.

“Actually, you only have fifty-eight seconds.”

And then, suddenly, an idea formed with crystal clarity in her mind. But she had to move quickly.

Melissa dropped to a knee and threw her backpack on the ground in front of her, opening it up and searching for her jump remote. She hadn’t bothered to make sure it recharged fully from when she drained it earlier that afternoon, and when she discovered the remote she realized it was only half-charged.

She swore.

But it would have to do. It was her only option.

Melissa began to twist the nexus dial on the remote, trying to find a distant time period in the past that shouldn’t affect human habitation. 2153 BCE. 11,013 BCE. 76,411 BCE.

“Fourteen seconds,” Hal said from Melissa’s pocket. “Now or never.”

She stopped at July 5, 91,448 BCE, changed the diameter to just a half-meter wide, disabled the safety warnings, and set the remote and nuclear bomb next to each other on the hardwood floor. Then she activated the remote and stepped back.

A small bubble of light began to coalesce around the two objects, disappearing as a ring in the wood floor.

“Five seconds,” Hal reported.

“It’s taking too long,” Melissa whispered.

Then there was a bright flash.

As a challenge to myself I began writing a novel in 2016. The main protagonist, an American spy, finds himself in the infantry ranks of a retreating German unit in the fall of 1944, his cover as a German propaganda artist not yet blown.

As the unit winds their way through the Carpathian Mountains, it comes under attack at night from a mysterious group of figures the survivors can only describe as monsters.

What's left of the unit seeks shelter in a nearby mountain town. The town's residents are welcoming and polite, but they're already providing refuge for a group of Russian soldiers who were similarly attacked. A tentative peace is formed as a blizzard sweeps in, preventing either broken military unit from leaving the area.

But the town harbors more than sanctuary: it's secrets are old and deep and the town's residents are not all they appear to be...

A sample from the first chapter:

Alois Stadler’s favorite word was shithead.

He was an opportunist with its use, diving into the practice of calling people shitheads like some men dive into eating peaches: A wanton disregard for cleanliness, the word spilling out of his mouth and over his chin. No one was protected from shithead status. Not men he considered his equal. Not women he courted. Not children he came upon playing in city streets. If you crossed Stadler, you could expect to be called a shithead. Hell, it was likely that Stadler would call the Führer himself a shithead if he ever met him face-to-face. Stadler used the word shithead to the point where it lost its vulgarity. It ceased being a concept of insult and devolved into meaninglessness. Stadler knew it and the people he commanded knew it, but that didn’t stop him from saying it. To Captain Stadler, shithead was a security blanket woven of hard words gone soft. He used it so often that no one else in his company ever had to.

Eduard Wieters heard the Captain utter the expression hundreds of times during the trip north. And now he heard that familiar phrase again as it bounced off the low buildings surrounding the plaza: “Let’s move, you shitheads,” he said to Frey and Weiz as he walked by.

Stadler’s officers shared a single cigarette on the Bacău city hall steps, the veteran yes-man passing the coffin nail to the younger cutthroat and then back again before the cigarette ended its life between a boot and a cobblestone.

Sunlight fell across Stadler’s features as he emerged from the shade, striking hard shadows across his face. Stadler might be one of only a handful of men alive that pleasant autumn sun could make uglier.

The three men fell into step with each other as they proceeded back to the makeshift convoy. The last of the supplies needed for the journey north would be gathered by now and unless Stadler wanted to stay another night in Bacău and risk an advancing Russian army overtaking them, they would be leaving soon.

Ed watched them from an alley with trepidation.

And Others...

In addition to my colorization work and writing, the following are a few other things I've created:

Something New

I’ve debated applying to Paradox for a number of years and maybe I missed my opportunity a long time ago. But I am a game developer at heart who has a passion for storytelling and grand strategy and, as a fan, I want to see Paradox succeed whether I’m a part of that team or not.

Though the Content Designer position is no longer listed, I am hopeful you will consider me for that role as I would prefer to work on-site in Sweden. As you can imagine, an international move is a big change for my family. It has been the primary concern in discussion I’ve had with my wife in even applying for the position. And it’s not fraught with concern on my end alone; as an American citizen, Paradox has to take special considerations that make it more difficult to hire me versus an EU citizen.

But I believe I’m a good fit and we’d make a great team. There’s an old adage about stepping out of your comfort zone, attributed to John A. Shedd: “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” The Freelance Content Designer position working remotely sounds like an amazing opportunity I wouldn’t want to pass up, but it doesn’t inspire me quite the same as working in-house.

Sweden is a beautiful country. The greater part of Scandinavia is the home of my ancestors (Sweden and Norway), and I believe there are opportunities to share a part of the world with my family—and myself—other than the one we already know.

Thank you for reading.

Rick Pierce
rickpierce@gmail.com

P.S. Jag har lärt mig lite svenska, också. ;)