The latest developer blog has been published on the Ship of Heroes site. In it, Casey McGeever reveals the importance of the Milestone Schedule, both as a tool to keep development on track and as a way to keep the community apprised of what the team is currently working on. In addition, McGeever writes about the reality of milestones -- that sometimes dates slip -- and how the developers work cooperatively to "ask how [they] can recover the schedule".
I often get the question of whether we put too much effort into preparing the schedule. The answer is no -- schedules pay for themselves in terms of manhours saved on almost every project. But for a project like ours, where our entire staff is scattered across the globe, and we need to manage a team that is 100% remote contributors, a schedule is essential for us. The hard part of the schedule is not preparing it -- that's a couple of hours at most, every 3-4 months. The hard part is thinking ahead, knowing what we can and cannot do with our small, highly committed team of developers, and a very small budget. Sometimes that means we say "no" to great ideas simply because we cannot do everything (at least right now). But the schedule enables us to be much more efficient with our work.
Read the full post on the Ship of Heroes site.
In addition to the above, we've also received a number of screenshots that show the most current iteration of the day/night cycle. You can check out all eight in our Ship of Heroes image gallery.
