Any tips for setting realistic time frames, especially when dealing with something the team hasn't done before (sounds like a lot of the netcode work and server tech is pretty uncharted waters)? Would you consider it better to work in a certain amount of flexible time to the initial schedule for when things (seemingly inevitably) run over, or is it more like a plan runs off track and you start fresh from where you are now?asked by Gravy

This is pure production work right here. Our job is to create those calendars. One of the things Lisa has is a calendar of all ship development, and the interesting thing about production, is the moment you make a calendar, it's immediately out of date. Because things, reality happens. Things change. People's schedules change. Resources become available or don't.

It's more of a living document. You change it and you update it every day. There are definitely periods, especially early on, we give a little more flex time. And then as we flesh things out, we can predict a little bit better, usually, against other ships we've done. I've definitely seen situations where we have ship concepts coming down the line, and we know that some of them are going to have some new unique functionality, we're going to have to flesh out the gameplay that comes along with that, and we'll talk to marketing about this and we'll say hey look, we can't predict this ship for this time, but probably around this period. And they'll say okay, well, let's see how that progresses. And then as things flesh out, we'll decide which ship to plug into that date depending on how it goes.Luckily we have a good marketing team who's willing to be reactive. When some ships come in early or, more often, a little bit late...

On top of that, a lot of the tech is very similarly related. For example, we'll use one of our animators, Mark McCall. If he has to animate a gun shooting, and the new ship that we're working on has a very similar gun, if historically it's taken him 3 days to animate it, then we know roughly that it's going to take three days to animate this other weapon. So, at least we have a ball-park estimate of what time frame it's going to take.Now, if it's something that's completely new and unprecedented, let's say we need to create some kind of instant repair beam or something, that's not an actual feature I'm just hypothetically throwing it out there...

Yeah I was thinking that someone's like, 'What is that?'

If it's something we've never done before, what we do as the producers, we ask those developers 'How long do you think it'd take to make this?' and we get their feedback. If we went to a designer they might say, 'Okay, it might take me a day to come up with a concept, another day to write the full design brief on it, and then maybe art may take two days,' so we kind of get their buy-in on how long it'll take, and we just update our schedule as we hit those dates.

And we always try to ask them even if we do think there's something similar that we can compare to, because our job isn't to create any of this, it's to facilitate everything. And you never know when we're going to say hey, this weapon's a lot like this one, so it'll probably take three days right, and Mark's like, hold on, no, you didn't account for the fact that we haven't done this yet, or it's on this kind of ship which is totally different, so we always, every single thing we have to check and check in again.

Another interesting point is that, as we go through more and more ships, we learn the processes as we go. So, one process, if we see that historically it has taken three days to do a certain type of feature, we're going to become more and more efficient as we go through, so what might have taken three days historically, we may have it down so pat that it only may take a day and a half to two days. So, it's one of the other advantages of having producers on hand, and also keeping these schedules up to date. We see the trend of how long it's taken before versus how long it's taking now, we can see where those increases are, where we need to give more time versus less time.

And that's, we're seeing that on the component pipeline right now.