The Grand Plan

Yesterday, we were taken to task for our poor communication by Romtos in our forums. He’s totally correct. We didn’t say much of anything for a good week.

I apologized, and then for a good chunk of yesterday I was really bummed about the fact that we’d screwed that up and gotten quiet. I mean, I know that one of our big advantages is that we can talk directly to our players. How had we gotten to that spot?

In part, it was because I’d been busy on non-AHD stuff – for the most part boring stuff that I didn’t want to tweet about. But I realized that another reason is that we haven’t made communication a priority. One thing I know is that good communication isn’t just something you can layer on top of your company or team, it’s something that you need to imbed bone-deep into your culture. So, I decided to get cracking on that.

Today I went into the Wave where we keep our Big Picture, did a quick clean-up, and just now posted it in the forums. This is a high-level brain dump of what we’re trying to do with the game… our roadmap to v1.0.

The list isn’t perfect – in fact, I’m sure that it is deeply flawed. It is probably already out of date, I know it is missing important items, and most of it won’t make sense to people outside the dev team. But that’s why it was important to get it out there. I think a large part of why I’m not saying more about the game is that I’m waiting for things to be perfect before talking about them – and that won’t work at all if we’re doing anything near open development. It’s going to be messy. So, here’s our current plan, in all its glory.

Please feel free to come by our forums and tell us what you think of it – we’d love your input. We’ll be updating it regularly.