We just released a public roadmap for Star Citizen, will there be a roadmap for Squadron 42 at some point in the future?
TL;DRA Squadron 42 roadmap will come once its tasks and epics are cleaned up, generated live from their project-management tool, with the update cadence (possibly monthly rather than quarterly) still undecided.
There will be at some point in the future, so Squadron's a little different because we're not doing our quarterly releases, but we are managing it exactly the same way, so the thing that's really cool about the roadmap, and I know I saw some discussion where people were like, hey, well what about this, and what about this, but don't worry, there's a lot of studies, it still needs to... We're still working on the whole sea guys. Yeah, the whole sea's definitely improved, the only reason why it actually wasn't put in as a task there was because there is a technical issue with the interior grids because the whole sea contracts and then expands away 100%, the art's finished, it's going to be in the game, but the bit where we were contracting and explaining the interior grid, which isn't like, we don't know how to do it, or it's a year task or anything, it's not at all, it just doesn't have a resource currently assigned to do that, and so they didn't want to expose that epic on the roadmap until they had that and then it was done, so that's kind of what's happening right now is that we've sort of switched our development methodology to be much, especially on Star Citizen, to be sort of more date driven, but we've also switched how we're running the teams internally to be much more agile team based, so before we were more pipeline based, the programmers had a list of all the things they were working on, the designers had a list of things they were working on, the artists had... And we still have some pipeline aspects like the ships, weapons, characters are pretty much a pipeline, but in terms of feature development, we've changed it around so we're building agile teams where you have the engineer and the designer and the artists that will be helping and supporting that all sort of embedded together working on the feature, and that is fairly different than how we were doing it previously where a lot of it was the engineer was given... We had a TD, here's the task we need from engineering, they would go and work it, here's the things design needs to do once we get the engineering, here's the thing we need from the artists, and there's communication and friction that happens in that so this is much more about having the small team agile style working, but that does mean that we change how we're utilizing JIRA, which is our project management task tool that we use, from a more... a bit set up more like a pipeline, especially for the engineering design, to more of the team task user story based, which is where we're going to. Now we did a little bit of it last year towards the end, but now we're doing it across, it's going to be exactly the same for every single studio across the company, and everyone's fully on board with that, we have all our senior production right now over in the UK, I think that will be in Germany next week, working and finishing these out, and the idea is that we... because we're updating the roadmap like we did for 3.0 where every Friday was always just a big song and dance because we had things in JIRA, but we were displaying them this other way, and then there was the longer term roadmap, had so much stuff in it that the production was so busy doing other stuff they didn't really have time to maintain it, so it totally got out of date, so they were updating the stuff that was for 3.0 but not later, and it just was a lot of extra work, so we decided we wanted to essentially expose our project management software, the JIRA stuff, to the website, so Turbulent built that whole roadmap tool, it basically takes it via the JIRA roadmap, and we have settings inside our epics that we can say this is a public epic, and then we can put user facing descriptions, and we can even add user pictures, so production development can just, when they set up the epic that they're working on, they can set it up also for the public facing, and it scrubs automatically into it, so the advantage of that is we don't have to manually update anything because there's lots of mistakes when you're manually updating stuff, so everything will just reflect the state of the tool that we're using to manage everyone across the company. Of course we're not showing every single task because there's thousands of tasks, and the information's overwhelming, so we sort of show the very high level, what you would call an epic, or in some cases sort of a saga, which is overwhelming, over quite a few epics. I know they have all these sorts of epics, sagas, stories, tasks.
It's like Joseph Campbell designed the JIRA.
Yeah, so we expose those, and we mark which ones are public facing. We wanted to get the roadmap in people's hands, which is why we went live with it here, but they still have organization work to do because they've got to take the way JIRA was set up before. Some of it's been done, not all of it's been done, so they have to change it around because they've got to organize under the right epics and everything. So in the case where they don't feel comfortable that they don't have it organized properly in this duplicate task, because sometimes there were tasks set up from before, but now we're setting it up on this new one, so in those cases they just choose not to show that epic publicly until they have it in shape, and so you'll see that roadmap will get more things added to it. Of course, things also will move around a little bit as maybe a bit more information comes to light, or how it's going, but that's the beauty of it. It's going to be 100% live reflection of the tool that we use to manage all the tombs, and we're using exactly the same process on Squadron 42, which is going to get me to answer the original question, which is are you going to get the roadmap like that? I can't remember the original question. And yes, we will. If you look on the side, there's a Star Citizen logo. There will be a Squadron 42 logo. You get the roadmap. So once we have the Squadron 42 tasks and epics all cleaned up and ready to go, then we will also turn that on and share it. It may not be done on a quarterly. It may be done on a monthly. I'm not quite sure. We're still discussing kind of the column format for it, but it will, again, scrub live from all the tasks that we have and epics and sagas that we have entered for finishing out Squadron 42.