Please find the most up-to-date version of the road map here:
http://90minutefever.com/roadmap/
Firstly, we are fully aware that it (quite literally) does not matter what our road map says - some people will be disappointed because the features that are most important to them personally do not all appear in the order they want them to appear. We hope however, that the vast majority of our users will be very happy to know what is coming over the next few months and will eagerly look forward to each monthly release.
Some key points to be aware of:
- We haven't released details of the road map beyond the next few months because we want to factor in the results of the user survey tool coming at the end of this month when putting together the rest of the November release and beyond.
- Some of these features involve lots of work, require lots of testing, have huge scope to break lots of things and cause lots of bugs, and will need to exist in Beta for an entire season before they can be deployed to live. The lead time on major match engine updates, and features like Youth Squads and Competitions, is multiple months. These features are already well into development right now. Obviously spending development resources working on a feature that will not be deployed into live until months down the track, means we can deliver less features in the short term.
- We know that improving the match simulator and giving users more things to do in the game are of paramount importance. For the next few months our key priorities are to drastically improve the match engine and implement Youth Squads/Competitions. The rest of the plan is built around this development work.
- We have a team of people will different skill sets. Different features require differing amounts of development time from different internal resources, testing time, time required in the Beta World. All of these things must be factored into our development path. This will inevitably result in some features appearing in live perhaps sooner than other features that may seem less important.
- We have a long term vision for this game and the develop path needs to build towards this vision over time to ensure it is realised.
- It is of paramount importance we consistently keep the Live Game World on Steam stable. This also needs to be built into the development path.
- Lots of priorities exist here and we are being pulled in more directions than anyone could probably imagine. So we expect that there are likely some features that users will not understand why it is being done when it is not important for them personally, and the answer likely likes in the fact that we have lots of users to take care of (veteran users of different types, new users, and users that will arrive at some point in the future) as well as business/project level priorities as well.
- We have internally discussed at great length whether Youth Squads/Competitions or User Created Competitions should have been developed first. In the end we went with the Youth but it was a very, very close decision. We are fully aware how much some users really want this feature. To be clear this was a huge decision for us, and at a project level for key reasons it is a bad feature to prioritise. We're spending a huge amount of resources, developing a feature that only a subset of our users (including no new users) will benefit from. Instead of developing something like User Created Competitions which would have benefited our entire user base. To fully document all the ins and outs as to the specifics of why this choice was made would require writing a separate forum post that would look more like a thesis. All I can say is that this was a very close decision for us and we hope that collectively the user base will be happy to see this feature even if they would have preferred to see the User Created Competitions come first. The reason why this decision could not wait to be decided by user vote via the survey tool coming at the end of this month is because we knew one of these two features had to be in ASAP, and we've already started working on it.
- Whilst we are going to do our best to minimise disruption with the Match Engine updates. The reality is these updates are huge. Not only do they require major changes to the core engine, but they also are going to empower users with a plethora of tactical options to influence the outcome of matches. They are fundamentally going to change the very nature of how matches are played out. After each of the major ME updates for sure it is going to require users adapting. And many users, inevitably, are going to adapt far less well than others and end up winning a lot less after each of these updates than they were before them. It does not matter how great these updates are for the game, we know there's going to be a subset of the users that end up winning less who are going to be unhappy (explode with rage). We already have a situation whereby we haven't changed the Match Engine at all during an end of season update, during the close season we have users sell all their senior players and buy a bunch of youth players. They then proceed to field a team of youth players the following season in senior competitions, and steadfastly believe the reason they are winning less is because we updated the public chat system. All hands on deck to be fully braced as to what is going to happen when we release these major ME updates that actually do materially change things.
- The road map is not a bona fide guarantee and is subject to change. We will keep it as up to date as we possibly can.