Visions and Goals
November 2003 through March 2004
I always worry when we post something like this schedule, mainly because they tend to be taken as gospel, written in immutable stone by the Deity of Development. If a schedule changes, you can bet at least one person will start screaming that promises were broken. Once players start reading this schedule, I’ve no doubt we’ll hear some of that. Our previous development schedule was pretty ambitious, a lot more effort than we planned on went into the September Hero class and content update and some major items slipped out.
With that in mind, let me state upfront:
Schedules can and generally do change as the circumstances and situation changes.
That is one reason many developers don’t deliver this much information to their players in a whole block and I can hardly fault them for that. Our situation is a bit different, however. We deliver monthly content while, at the same time, work on delivering new game systems and features. At the same time, we seek as much input as early as possible to balance the wants and needs of the players with our ability to deliver on them. For us, it makes more sense to get these things out there now for discussion and take our lumps later on if the schedule slips.
Below, you’ll find the general schedule, with the major items we’ve planned for each month. More than this goes into the game, of course; these are just the major content and code pieces. You’ll note that some items have a yellow background and you’ve seen them before. The schedule for those items is contingent on being able to find and hire two additional game system coders to lend their hands to the tasks before the end of the year. The tough truth is that it is the only way housing and item storage (the latter of which is required for consignment vendors) are going to get done in any kind of timely manner. I’ll keep you up to speed on our progress there.
Finally, the content plans for January and February are still being finalized, so we’ll issue an update on that in the next 15 days.
NOVEMBER
Code
Content
DECEMBER
Code
Content
Content Revisions
JANUARY
Code
Content
FEBRUARY
Code
Content
MARCH
Code
Content
