Roadmap

So recently I was asked about a roadmap of Dune II – The Maker. And frankly, the only thing I had on my mind was just to keep on working and release more often. My ‘roadmap’ looked a lot like this:

(from: desertusa.com)

I did not really had a fixed scope, or goal for the next (0.5) release.

A lot of time has passed, and a lot of work is done, but yet the amount of releases is not as high as I would’ve liked it to be. And, neither are their feature sets. They are mostly refactoring, and limited new features.

This has to change.

And a roadmap can help me with that.

The roadmap i’ve laid down is pretty straight forward. I came to this roadmap by first writing down a few user stories which I think that should be in the game to consider it ‘finished’. Then, I decided how much work it would be to implement / finish a user story. I did this on a gut feeling basis.

I actually found that the user stories where fairly big. Because of the size of the user stories, I have made the following decision:

The coming stable release will contain only one user story:

The reason for this is simple:

• it gives direction
• it forces me to handle the main menu properly and the skirmish mode properly
• it forces me to have the (in game) engine ready enough to be playable
• it forces me to fix some bugs here and there

Only when I have finished this user story I will look at other big things to do. When I refactor, I will do so in the benefit of this user story. When I throw away code, I do that to achieve my goal set above. All actions should derive from this.

So when will this version be released? Frankly I have no clue. The amount of work is quite a lot, and my time is limited. Nevertheless, I am working on it big time, so just keep visiting and keep yourself updated. You can also follow Dune II The Maker at twitter!