Star Citizen: Pillar Talk - Staggered Dev

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   as I say I'm gonna be forced by Christie I have a penny collection one of every point in circulation this guy gentlemen welcome back to pillar talk pillar talks are meant to talk about the patch and the upcoming release kind of talk about the future the past a little bit whatever we want to talk about really so with John thanks for returning our vehicle pipeline director this is your second rodeo yep surprise stand in for Sean disappeared at short notice Marin chief development officer welcome to your first pillar talk I trying to avoid this which I think this episode though we're gonna focus on a couple things the first one development we're talking

2. 00:00:48

   about the development process we frequently will kind of go through and evaluate our development process from time to time and then we're doing that right now so Aaron what's what are your about you know working on the the project and you know we've adjusted a few times and on the development side in terms of you know working out what works what doesn't work we noticed in the last two deliveries we we missed it by a couple of weeks each time because basically some features were coming in late and so we couldn't get the rest you know the the proper QA time to go in then you want to give us no point having a thousand features in the game if half the time half of them don't work how would you expect them to read you're not gonna have a fun time playing in that game the idea is rather than trying to get it done and squeeze all into three or four weeks we actually give us all some plenty of time so when we're delivering these features we don't have more time developer make sure on the

3. 00:01:35

   right we have more time to really polish them we have more time to really make sure that they you know that the fun they work but does that change our release schedule pee-yew we're still living every cottage that we're trying to get a cadence where half the teams are basically getting more time you know we split them a bunch of the teams to smaller groups they'll be working with six months before work I'm gonna get three point seven done in that period of time so we can start the other teams overlapping so a bunch of the teams that work on a free point stuff while then the three point seven teams to finish a free bonus ever will then be working towards basically three point nine you take that time and then the development for it means that each for a sprint that's basically two weeks to run go through three Sprint's of six weeks actually we're excited we could do more like eight sprints altogether which is sixteen which is kind of planned to make sure that we stay on task and we still deliver every two quarters on a

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   staggered development for your teams like you just don't want to put in place certain things are like checks and bounces and get to QA and yes it's essentially the same process just over a larger time frame which just makes each of those individual gates a much more achievable goal you want to keep it quarterly literally but why do we need to force all the teams all the time to be trying to get hit this quarterly delivery compromises they especially on the dev sighs when when in your mind you you've got the first week of a quarter you're doing your planning you know what you're going to do you execute on it then you prepare for the patch and you go out to have a car TP to you and you're doing your feedback and then you're expecting a date for it to be gone you know and you start again when

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   it goes past that the other day doesn't tend to move so you you then have to pinch that time back some ways do you take out the planning taking our planning is usually a bad thing because then it makes that executing it worse this content team has already run to a different cadence they're not delivering every quarter they may work for you know if you're working on I mean you know I'm genocide ship so you know when we're happy with them with like we always used to go towards here's the quarter releases for the year particular ships between it don't go in but then it was a case of or this ship needs more time because we're not happy with X Y Zed on it rather than just release to ship at a day we'll release it when it's ready defender of the 890 you know saying well for a lot of the environment work you know if you're doing a big landing location plummet that's not something you just usually can fill in you know

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   and in a nice tight you know no free month of quarterly period it goes longer but on the feature side generally I mean yes we had some features which there went a bit longer main mining was one of them the original set money went through and that took a you know a a couple of quarters in the background but but since that period we've really been trying to just fit everything into a sort of Courtin release no reason you do that's because we want to show as much you know as a team we're all trying to show as much new stuff for new features and work as we can to the community and we're trying to just you all it and John you know with this kind of cadence from a team's perspective I guess how does this impact like the vehicle team that you're working with aside from obviously giving us more time because you by doing it as a say a six-month or longer block you you strip out those multiple planning and testing not testing but sort of preparing for releases if you're doing the feature and

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   a quarter you you lose like time for planning for that quarter and for testing that quarter you string them together you can strip that middle bit hours and spend that on development instead and it helps move away from developing features is like a a checklist of features like we want to do X&Y in the game if you do it in this very specific order knowing these caveats you can do it sure but that doesn't make it a fun exciting experience to do and we've got a huge amount of features in the game that if we tweak and sort of polish those they will just work together so much more nicely and then the whole overall experience becomes what new features in there we don't have the time and things break it's frustrating we do we want to get away from that we want to make that now when we deliver you know you know my my huge drive is to make sure that you

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   know from now on every time we deliver it is better than the last thing that the last call you had we felt like the last quarter tips we pushed some stuff in it wasn't quite as you know you know as good as we'd like it some of this comes from I think you know to throw anyone here at some of this comes from the community some of it comes even from the developers right internally like a lot of times we do a lot of post mortems we do a lot of feedback gathering and then we ourselves know these things but like how can we make the experience good if the developers for the community but then also get the game to that where we would feel like buddy yeah like it took my earlier because you you're moving away from just ticking off a feature and saying technically it's done that feature works but you have to work around a bit by doing this this and that it allows people to sort of have more pride and just a great feeling about doing this thing like this is a feature that I've worked on for six months and it works great so now I'm happy for

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   people to play it rather than I was told I had to do this feature and this is what was provided in the time and I know it's not great this is all I could do at the time yeah wanted it out and and you know a lot of that is about getting stuff in there'll be a lot of different cool stuff you know getting the economy working properly getting a bunch of missions working from getting the AI working properly getting lots of locations on the planets with all the different feature sets we have for creating we've got this wonderful you know the planetary tablet which um allows us to basically just create you know everything on the fly and the locations off like and all that stuff working if we get that stuff working we get this working stuff and then we have an amazing gameplay experience and then and then we can provide features and content and gameplay for years to come you know to really just keep the you know to really you know keep you know this make this incredible universe we're

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    doing kind of under came the staggered of six months why six months why not a year what was kind of the thing behind that I mean if a feature needed more than six months you'd have it it's just more about doubling the case we felt like typically six months is quite a good number but yes sometimes things take longer but there will be some features which may need nine months and any nine months people work on nine months it's just what we aren't prepared to do is just try and throw it all in at the end and then just have this huge mess of stuff and things we want to actually get to a level where we where it goes in because it's working it's been tested we we think it's fun that's great yes there's gonna be one or two wishes a few polish friends but we now now know we have the time to really make it great and then what is this you know kind of impact have on you can we talk about features how many features quality features do we are we going to reduce features like what's our plan we have we have a whole list of the features that

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    we apps hundred percent and deliver but what we want to do is deliver them in a way that makes sense and that means that we are gonna get we're gonna we're gonna go and gonna get all the cool stuff we have working properly and then when everything is working the way it should I mean at that point that we for a game that would be more gameplay than pretty much anything out there already and then we were to talk about squadron 42 it is this but is there any impact it's quite a 42 I mean I mean I mean you make John books and everything as well but really should help I mean yeah this whole situation means that there's less downtime for people who are doing the squadron work I'd have to support stuff for the PU we have the longer development cycles because a bunch of the work this means all the squadron features are in the PU I mean it's a shared code base so this whole thing should really help you know everybody in what they're doing yeah the people that are working on

12. 00:08:46

    missions for squadron having to sort of work with the same stuff that goes out every culture obviously they get it as it comes in but if people are struggling to do a certain feature in the PU then spending longer to fix it means that the squadron team gets that fix in a better state sooner so helps them so in terms of a long term roadmap yes I think you will see some changes to that then we're gonna basically just break down exactly where we're going with all the features and so forth to get them to where they need to be and you know we'll be sitting here in a year's time and we'll talk about some other improvements we want to do a sail for but it's I mean that's Devon it's I mean you can't you can't stand still you have to sit there and you and your learning experiences you look at what worked if you just blindly

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    do the same thing over and over again Chris said in them in Susan come last year is you know our plan is to you know when we have persistence when we have some as core features in like we've got like the orgs working properly which is part of this drive as well for the things we're doing when we have the server machine going at that point we feel like we have a game and that's what we want to get to so we're working while all this is going in we're cleaning everything you know we're polishing up we're making all these features work great we're adding all the sub features in there and so forth and at that point we have the game that people can just play and really love and play and then that's great after that every quarter we give them more we give them more we give them more clear than gonna basically just keep on building on this for you know for years to come well gentlemen that was it pretty painless trailer talk thank you so much for joining us thanks obviously thanks subscribers and on behalf backers firms

14. 00:10:21

    let's do all the stuff always yeah let's get back to work thank you Jason you [Music]