ZF Roadmap Changes
We’ve been pouring through your alpha feedback and considering what it means for the Zenith Frontier project. As those of you who have been playing the alpha builds will know, the prototype is far from a feature complete game. It has served its purpose, however, as a technical proof of concept for the major components of the game, such as user interface, procedural generation, and dynamic economy.
Satisfied that we are capable of delivering on our vision of Zenith Frontier, we’re happy with the positive feedback we received from our alpha testers and confident that we can address all of the concerns you raised. We are now expanding the scope of our design and development efforts, so in the short term it may feel as if we’ve taken a step backwards. It’ll take some time to refactor the prototype codebase into high quality production code.
Here are the changes we’re making:
Transitioning to a new software development tool: Jira. We’ll be using it for planning, tracking, releasing and reporting on Zenith Frontier’s codebase. This change will provide flexible planning, accurate estimations, value-driven prioritisation, and transparent execution.
New issue tracking, feature request and feedback tool: Jira Service Desk. This is for our testers. It’ll allow you to collaborate with developers in a more transparent way which will allow you to track the progress of issues you raise from a user-friendly portal. This will be a much better experience than the Google forms that you have been using!
Refactoring UI, simulation engine, procedural generation, and other major components to allow more creative options and tighter control of functionality. This way, when players let us know about a tuning or balance improvement we could make it will be much quicker for us to make the change and release it to the live build.
Every single component of the game will be developed to be fully moddable! Not just resources and world generation, but even the user interface itself. Fully customise screens and their elements, or create entirely new user interface views.
We’ll be rolling out greater automation of internal processes to free up more time for design and development work.
Trialling a more stringent impact analysis to assess the scope, impact and severity of issues and features so that we can make the game as you want it to be.
Gameplay and interaction data collection to support issue tracking, roadmapping, and gameplay design and balancing. This will allow us to make more data-driven decisions instead of relying on hunches and intuition.
We hope that you can see that we’re making this decision to allow us to support the project through to its full release, but unfortunately this does mean that we are returning to the pre-alpha phase of development. We are estimating that the changes described above, including refactoring the prototype, will take approximately 13 weeks so we’ll be launching the second alpha testing period on 11th August 2019.
Along the way we’ll be keeping you up to date with all aspects of development. We have received a positive response when sharing progress that is usually only shared internally in the game development industry, such as new Triton SDK tools that will be used to assist future work. We’ll include you in all internal progress updates because we want our relationship to be as transparent as possible.
We’re grateful to have you with us and hope that you will continue to participate in the Zenith Frontier journey.