We know you guys have to re-allocate resources when it's crunch time to get vital items on the list done. How do you deal with peoples' pet projects? If they have done all their work by Thursday do they get to work on something of their choice on Friday? Are pet projects only allowed on their personal time (off the clock)?asked by Kurupt

Well, I like the idea of running it like Montessori.

Hahaha.

"You have this many math assignments for the week and if you get them all done by Friday you can go outside!"

I went to Montessori school.

Me too - in third grade, yeah. [chuckle]

Well...

I think a little bit of everything.

I think the first thing to understand about any development schedule is it's not written in stone, right? You don't just make a schedule and then it all just works. It moves around, it shifts, it changes every day. So, you know, when it's time to get something out to the players we have to make decisions, and then have to decide what's more important than something else. And we have to say, "yeah, I know you're working on this thing right now - we need you to stop, and we need you to focus on this. Get that done, and then when you're done with that you can get back to this other thing."

Yeah, and I guess that goes back to another thing that's kind of, well, nice and unique about us, is we're not shipping a disc. So, just because this person puts this on hold for the final push to a patch, doesn't mean it's never getting done ever, and it's cut from the game forever, will never happen. It just means, "hey, until three weeks from now, table this, and then we'll come back to it."

Yeah, we have a backlog of things that people would like to work on, or things that we'd like to see implemented in the game. And on top of that we try to at least gear towards people's specializations anyway. I mean, we're not going to give a UI design to someone who maybe want to program missiles. So we want to make sure the people who are actually working on the project are invested emotionally and mentally in that particular aspect of the game.

Yeah. Yeah, you want 'em to be passionate about it. And the other thing... it kind of dovetails nicely with the other question about where and how do design ideas come about, where, you know a lot of people-... We talk about peoples' pet projects generally to me, in this context, would mean like a prototype for something, a design for something, and Calix is I think famous around the office for coming up with all kinds of crazy prototypes - there's illegal racing, and he created that test level, ship graveyard, where he has his own call-sign insignia.

I think uhh, didn't Murray Cup come up this way?

Yeah. Murray Cup is one of those things that was initially an idea that was bandied about. It was a piece of thing in the lore, and somebody was like, "ahh, racing would be cool,"...

I thought I recalled- I don't know who did it, but I thought I recalled seeing a very simplified version of race map, that then was kinda the genesis of what Murray Cup became, but originally it was sort of a test piece. Like, "hey, I built this to sort of test the ships and fly them around," and then that sort of evolved into "hey, we could make that a thing!"

Yeah. I dunno if you've seen Calix's hologram city? It's so fun to fly around, and it makes me want to do a racing map in a city.

What this hologram city?

It's like, literally it's one of the backdrops for, I think it's ArcCorp, and then you can just fly between all the canyons and valleys of the city skyscrapers.

Ohh, I wanna fly through that!

It would be incredibly dangerous...

Yeah! [laughs]