Update 13: Goals & Roadmap
Hello folks,
In continuing our goal of providing a transparent development process, we are making one of the tools that we use behind the scenes available for you to view. This roadmap should provide better insight into our progress and current goals.
You can fine that here: Monsters and Memories: Roadmap (Trello)
We’ll keep an eye out to see if this provides you with value. Hit us up in our Discord or on the streams with feedback.
Background
From the onset of the project (roughly Sept-Oct 2020) we put together a Trello board that describes the features and functionality that we’d expect to encounter as we progress through the game as players.
This “Player’s Journey” serves as our high-level deconstruction of the game (and the services supporting the game).
We use this Player’s Journey board as a form of guide, which we then discuss in more detail via other tools:
Slack is where the bulk of our design discussions occur (in roughly 25-30 individual channels)
Confluence is where we document decisions, longer-form ideas, and serves as a compendium for our lore and worldbuilding
Ongoing discussion of larger concepts like World Timeline, Factional Relationships, etc are also handled in Trello as a form of Writer’s Room post-it wall (since it’s easy to move cards around)
Tasking and bug reporting is handled via issues in Github
Discord and Twitch are used to bounce ideas off of the community
Note: Feel free to let us know if you think we’ve missed something critical in the Player’s Journey. We’re almost always monitoring Discord, and we stream development (or us gathering inspiration/playing games) a few times as week. We’re down to hear your thoughts.
Examining the Board
The board tracks all of the systems and features that we’re targeting for the launch of Monster & Memories.
Goals and Progress on the current milestone is tracked in the first column.
The ^^ PROOF OF CONCEPT ^^ cards delineate between POC and Launch functionality.
Each of the other cards indicate:
Their status
Initial Implementation Done (for items that require iteration)
Done
In-Progress (with current Milestone #)
To Be Discussed
The Milestone(s) in which they were worked on
Milestone TBD for anything that's a part of the POC, but hasn’t been worked on
Discrete content (ex. Buildings, Barrels, Bats, Breastplates, and Battleaxes) is not listed here. Keep an eye on the Milestone Goals for an overview of this work, or pop by the streams.
Note: You can expand the labels on all of the cards by clicking on any of the colored “dots” on each card
Future Milestones
We’re likely to only show the current Milestone, and potentially what we’re considering for the upcoming/next Milestone.
The reason for this is, now that we’ve got the foundational systems in place, we’re prioritizing work linked to the core feel of the game, followed by bigger open questions.
Each Milestone will inform the direction of the subsequent Milestones.
If we were to try and organize all of the work into discrete Milestones from the onset, we’d be painting an arbitrary picture of the approach - and inevitably reorganizing & restructuring those Milestones as we go.
Far reaching, highly structured, multi-milestone plans are not the sort of fantasy we’re making here.
Also, we’re not working towards an arbitrary release date (or one that’s set by a specific budgetary constraint for the time being).
Keep an eye on this Player’s Journey board, our updates here, and our streams & Discord to get a feel for how much we have left to go, and whether or not we’re succumbing to Feature Creep.
We’re being as transparent as possible, so that you can judge these things for yourselves.
On that note:
Keep in mind that we’re showing you our work as we go, from Day One.
This means that we let you see us experiment, explore, make mistakes, and debate ideas in real-time.
If you’re looking to see/hear the -final- results of these discussions, so that you can determine if this is the game for you - come back later.
If you want to observe the process of making an humble little indie MMO (and even chime in as we go) -
Welcome!