How do you coordinate efforts between game play feature implementation and relative ship completion? For instance, if mining was being brought into the client would you automatically put the Orion into production? Or would you shelve mining until the Orion or the other small mining vessel was done?asked by MinionSoldier
TL;DRThe developers say features and ships are planned together so a feature has content to use, such as a ship for a mechanic, and the supporting systems must exist before the ship is built.
This is where a lot of the strategic planning and communication between production design comes into play. This is also where good direction from management, Chris or Ben, also comes into play. So when we release a feature or a ship thematically, for example, if we wanted to do a salvage feature, ideally we want to have content for players to take advantage of that.So, a salvage specific ship would be a good example of releasing when we released the salvage mechanics, same thing if we wanted to release a repair mechanic, you know having the what's is it... Endeavor. Having that come out at the same time would make good sense. If we created a mining mechanic using your example here, if we created the mining feature but we don't give players a ship to do mining on. It's a feature that's basically sitting there waiting until we have that feature completed or a ship to take advantage of that feature. Ultimately, this is where planning and preproduction and communication comes into play.
Right, so none of these things are coincidental. When we do decide to create a ship and decide a release date for it, we need to ensure that the systems that make that are unique to that ship actually exist... are designed out and are implemented from code and tech design so that those systems are in play by the time the ship is actually created.
A good example is quantum travel, if we released quantum travel without any ship that can quantum travel...
Doesn't make a lot of sense. So, there is a lot of design that goes into that... quantum travel is a great example. We needed to decide what quantum travel was, how it realized itself in the game, how the component interaction for quantum travel was, standard things like the distance for quantum travel, time for quantum travel, quantum fuel is a thing now so we implement quantum fuel as a part of quantum travel. That's a system that needed to be designed before we created a bunch of ships that were capable of doing quantum travel.
Excellent question but yes it is not coincidence that we release these like that.