Quote of the Week: Themes and tag-lines

shit pops up
you go find it
things happen

the actual tagline for odyssey 

-- CCP Rise (the first three lines) and CCP Fozzie (the last line)

This exchange is reproduced with permission from the CSM-CCP Skype conversation.  ;-)  I just love it.  And it's the quote of the week.

From time to time here, you'll hear me make reference to the old-fashioned "theme" that was a hallmark of U.S. education when it came to teaching kids how to write in the 1950s and 1960s.  It eventually morphed into the "formal essay" form that I believe is still used today.  But one of the key elements to the old-fashioned theme -- particularly relative to today's more stream-of-consciousness writing styles -- is that kids were taught that anything that didn't fit the theme should be cut.

And that's kind of what's happening to Odyssey right now.  As we get closer and closer to the release date, some features are being postponed from the Odyssey release.

EDIT (17/May/2013): I'm an idiot.  I could have sworn I saw that Personal Storage Arrays weren't going to be ready in time for June 4, but Fozzie reports that they are.  So I've deleted the reference to them not being ready on time.  I apologize, and I regret the error.

Why pick that feature to delay rather than something else?  Themes!  This is how EVE development is going to work for what is likely to be the next three years:

• step one: a lot of potential and suggested features build up into a big pile;
• step two: CCP devs (with the help of the CSM) collaborate and decide on a theme for the next expansion;
• step three: features are pulled out of the big pile that seem to fit the theme;
• step four: if one of those isn't a big signature theme feature, then a big signature theme feature is brain-stormed and chosen;
• step five: devs work in sprints on the chosen features;
• step six: as the release date gets closer, features that aren't going to be finished in time are put aside; and,
• step seven: release date.

I'm not giving up CCP's secrets here.  This stuff was covered during sessions at Fanfest this year, notably at the opening Retribution Review session on Thursday, which turned out to be quite a good overview of how project management is done at CCP.  In particular, when evaluating a list of features for the next expansion, CCP uses a system nick-named "Moscow" to decide what will stay and what will go.  It's actually an acronym: MSCW, standing for "Must, Should, Could, Won't."  For a given feature, the devs decide "Is this feature a must?  Or a should?  Or a could?"  Each gets tagged and the "M" features get worked on first.  Stuff tagged "W" doesn't get worked on at all.  Stuff tagged "C" might get worked on or might get cut or pushed back in favor of "M" and "S" features.  Those new anomalies?  "M".  The new scanner?  "M".  Probing changes?  "M".  They're a direct part of the theme.  See the tag line above.  ;-)

But don't forget step eight: those features that didn't get finished in time for release date are pushed back to point releases.  This is what happened with dueling in Retribution.  It didn't get finished in time for Retribution 1.0, but it made it into the game eventually.  So "keep calm and carry on", I believe the saying goes.  The features that match the theme will be in the game first.  But the other stuff will make it in too.  We might just have to wait a few weeks since they don't really fit the theme...