Apologies for being a day late on this! We've been very busy planning, tweaking, and tweaking plans, and planning tweaks and tweaking tw- ah you get the idea.
WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING
Well, we're about to move into the first sprint of Production! As of Monday, we'll all be working really hard to make the game a reality. Wait. I mean, or course we've been doing that this whole time but now we're done with the planning and pre-production phase!
We have a load of dates in mind for exciting moments along the way, plus of course the Early Access launch date itself. It's incredibly satisfying to be moving ahead with this - no small thanks to your amazing support - and to be sharing a glimpse at the roadmap with you is both thrilling and a bit stressful.
Having a plan is one thing. Writing it down is another because it becomes way more real. Showing people the plan is just... you can't go back! We can't un-show you this 😅
DAT ROADMAP
But we can caveat the crap out of it, and say - seriously now - all of this is up for change, tweaks, things might get dropped or shifted around. As we move into production we get a better idea of what we can and can't do in the time we have, and we will be adapting these plans to fit almost constantly. More on that below.
We're presenting this in a way that does not overpromise. You'll notice there are no numbers of Trinkets or Quests or whatever. If there's stuff that's seemingly not mentioned at all or is skated over, it's because of that. We want to make sure we're transparent about progress and if possible we overdeliver rather than underdeliver 💖
KEY DATES
MAY - Beta
Very exciting for any of you who will get access to it as part of your rewards! We'll be granting access to the game, and gathering lots of lovely feedback. This is one of the key moments that will impact our plans from there onwards because if you love something or hate something, we'd be mad not to double down on it or address it!
JUNE - Next Fest Demo
This demo will be built off the feedback and hopefully shows the game in a brilliant light, and should contain loads of content too! We will also be leaning into your support and asking you to help us spread the word. The better we do during Next Fest, the better a launch we'll have!
JULY - Early Access Launch
Um, trying not to think about this too much and get all nervous! But also we've got so much to do in preparation. Again, we'll be looking to you lovely lot to help us in any ways we (and you!) can think of!
AUGUST - Continued development
This gets very loose, but in terms of the current goals, we'd love to drop weekly patch updates to the game, which would contain bug fixes, quality-of-life updates, tweaks, balancing and polish. Then alongside that, but spread out to every 2 months, we'd drop a huge update with a new Feature (something like being able to Haggle with Customers, or perhaps Customise Trinkets, all those dream features!) with tons of new content to support it (new customers, quests, trinkets, etc). That way we keep improving the game every week, and expand the content and add new mechanics every 2 months.
This phase could go on for a very long time! We've got tons of cool stuff we'd like to put in the game, and no doubt you'll all have loads of amazing ideas too!
HOW WE WORK
As we move into Production, we start with all the tasks listed out in Miro, with virtual Post-it notes. Then we estimate their complexity very roughly, with the smallest being XS and the largest being XL. An XS task should be less than a day, an L might take almost 2 weeks, while an XL is so big we're not actually sure, and we need to dive into more detail.
So then we lay out a calendar that splits our production time into 2-week sections called Sprints. This combined with the sizing gives us a really simple and fast way to spread the tasks out and see if they all fit into the time we have.
When that's all done and agreed, we plug the first Sprint of tasks into our project management tool (Hack N Plan for anyone interested), and we break those tasks down into tikes as small as is sensible, so that we all individually and as a team know what we're doing for the next two weeks.
As we progress through those tasks, we'll see how accurate our guesses were, and that accuracy (or lack of!) will be passed back up to the Miro calendar, and the remaining elements will get nudged and moved and resized. As we do more work, we get a more accurate idea of the time things will take, and we can adjust easily using this method, rather than rummaging around in reams of individual tickets, plus it means we're not front-loading the planning so we're able to always dedicate time to making the game better even at this point.
While a Sprint is going, we look to plug the next one into Hack N Plan using the same process, and that way we're always ahead of any problems in terms of the next work, but also we're not bogged down in details and wasting time breaking down tasks that may or may not be moved, delayed or brought forward.
This is all done to keep us nimble, keep us making good and focused progress on building the game, and any tasks that are more or less complex than we originally thought they were get caught early, and the resulting shift in the rest of the planned work is known nice and early, so that as things do inevitably change we can keep you in the know!
PHEW
Thanks for attending our Goblin Production lecture! Your homework is to take break from work around 4pm and treat yourself to something nice - a good cup of tea and a biscuit, or maybe that new cardigan you've been eyeing up on Etsy!
That's it for this update,
Stay warm, cosy and healthy!
The Spilt Milk Goblins 🥰