How do you even keep track of all the small things up to the big i.e the sheer size and difference of things like (1) creating modular assets of new designs that can be used for new systems/stations/landing points, (2) bugfixing and adding important content to ArcCorp (e.g. Subsumption update, netcode...buggies) and (3) all the as-of-yet secret economy systems (simulators, deep designs) for the far away multi-system PU?! Do you prioritize all those things on a daily or weekly basis?asked by Doc
TL;DRTony only looks about 12 months ahead, so anything outside that goes into a documented backlog, while producers break the nearer features into tasks with leads in JIRA, prioritizing what benefits both the PU and Squadron 42.
Yeah, there are a lot of requests that come in from Chris and Tony for all kinds of things and speaking for Tony...Tony's general philosophy he's told me several times is that he really only has a 12 month horizon meaning that he only really cares at any given moment about what's on the horizon for the next 12 months, what's on the schedule for that time. It makes things a little easier to manage on my side since the amount of content in the game planned right now takes us well beyond 12 months from now. Things that don't fall in the next 12 months usually fall into a backlog for later review, things aren't falling through the cracks or anything, we document everything and make sure it goes into a backlog. That backlog grows, grows and grows but 12 months everytime something gets finished or completed we pull something else out. That's kinda how a backlog works.
There's never a shortage of good ideas.
No, never and a lot of those good ideas come from the community so thanks. As far as keeping track of the features goes...usually it's a matter of just pulling features from the backlog, producers gathering estimates and dependencies for those features from the lead. A lot of times it's a relationship between the producer and the lead talking about a feature figuring out what's required, how we break this down into individual tasks and then taking those tasks and documenting them in our task tracking software. We use JIRA here. That's kind of how that whole process works for me at least.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, our new focus will be looking at the backlog to see what features are needed for the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42 so we can focus on Star Citizen as a holistic product. If something is Persistent Universe only, it'll probably go back to the backlog for the year for the next time we review the backlog. We'll build those features for the Persistent Universe as we get closer to rolling those features out and rolling out different patches for the Persistent Universe.So basically, if Squadron 42 needs something that is also beneficial for the PU, those things will get prioritized higher than something that's only beneficial for the PU.