In her defense, FatsharkCatfish explained numerous internal discussions are still ongoing within Fatshark not finalized for official publication on her behalf. She admits consistency of outputting content is a major problem for the development team and due to that flaw a static roadmap would be a burden than a benefit in their current situation. The implication is too many concentration on different parts of Darktide is being re-evaluated constantly that any roadmap would become dated soon enough.
Therefore, here is my proposal to the Fatshark development team from being involved in the Back4Blood player base as a former regular player of that game: https://trello.com/
Trello allows topics to be organized in such a way that an organization can show its audience the ongoing tasks happening behind-the-scenes. Furthermore, these tasks are not static; they can be moved around on a board list depending if certain tasks need more time for development. No time commitment!
In the case of Turtle Rock Studios that developed Back4Blood, they had four columns (To-Do, Active, In Testing, Release/Live) and each column is sectioned into different squares that indicate which parts of the game (Audio, UI, Gameplay, etc.) are affected along with the severity level impacting the game (e.g. High Priority). When tasks are progressing, they move from left to right based on completion. Again, what is not included is date and time so no pressure on the developers in case more time is needed for a certain task to be ready.
Turtle Rock Studio is/was transparent on the development cycle of Back4Blood which no other game dev team has made use of yet in my social gaming experience. I want to see Fatshark attempt at using Trello because communication with their player community has a long tradition of being very concerning. The early days of Vermintide 2 & Vermintide: End Times from my personal experience. War of the Roses & War of the Vikings from second-hand accounts. Again, Trello could be a source of substantial help in developing further communication between devs and players for now and future.
We are working on the following things but cannot provide any details on our planned solution as they are subject to change, nor any ETAs because they are also subject to change:
This single sentence proves they have 0 clue in what direction they want to take the game.
EDIT: It literally makes it look like whole debate about Darktide was: “Hey wanna make another Warhammer game?” “Ye, 40K style game could make a lot of money…”
Additionally no roadmap is static. But if you publish a roadmap in static image, you have to notify the community about the changes (not like they did on VT2).
Many other, even non-PvE games use Trello, to just show the direction of the game to the community. To show them what tasks have higher priority and maybe to give a community chance to vote on priority of some bugs.
However, as @Reginald has pointed out, just a basic list of things they work on or “plan” to add to the next patch would be nice.
As an example Development update #50 and #51 from Ready or Not
#50 (map sneak peek + possibilities and challenges with AI)
#51 (sound update from sound director and modder-turned-developer)
I’m all for transparency and am curious about what that could look like in Fatshark’s environment.
Fatshark uses Agile development methodology, which is characterized by short iterations (called "Sprints), focusing on the rapid development and implementation of small features/enhancements (called “user stories”).
User stories are fed into a prioritized list of deliverables (called a “backlog”). Groups of related user stories are called an “Epic” and a collection of epics makeup “Initiatives”.
Tools like Trello, Basecamp, and other task management utilities are useful. Still, I’m not sure where that would fit, given that they already use Jira for ticketing and probably Agile project management.
This means that someone would have to take duplicate the backlog from Jira in Trello and keep it maintained. Fatshark already has several lines of communication (Steam, the Darktide official website, Discord, Reddit, etc.), so adding another runs the risk of creating more confusion/questions.
For instance, if a team is unable to complete a user story within a given sprint (i.e., runs into an unforeseen technical issue), that story might get split (i.e., partially implemented features drops off, and the broken part becomes a new story and then added to the next sprint), or just stuffed into the backlog… imagine the community backlash… “HEY! Trello said feature X was in development, now it’s not!!? WHAT GIVES!?”
Many people enjoy hotdogs, but few want to know how the sausage is made .
Are you telling us about the FS environment or are you curious about it? Because the paragraphs below looks like you’re telling us about it.
Are you sure? Because recent fook ups, suggest Fatshark has never heard of agile. Latest Patch 10 has seen QA from the tops of Empire State Building, pity QA never seen the patch.
EDIT: And if they would actually run Agile, exporting stories for the next 2 sprints as roadmap, would take about 10 minutes…
Community will backlash more, if they don’t publish anything. Promise A and deliver B (like they promised crafting in December, then left for vacation without any word and released crafting in January like nothing happened) or if like on VT2 they produce a roadmap, but they forget about it and never mention it again, while community does not.
No, just speculating about what might be, based solely on publicly available information.
Nope, just speculation. They have a job posting for a “Producer / Agile team lead”, so I figured they’d need to be an Agile dev shop to necessitate that, but I don’t know that to be the case.
Possibly! A direct integration might not be appropriate as it could disclose information they don’t want to (or need to) share (e.g., employee names, who’s working on what, etc.). Not insurmountable, but something to consider.
I would agree that more communication/transparency is better than less - sorry if that didn’t come across clearly in my ramblings .
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