Moving to the second milestone

Time to move forward

After months of work, we looked back on everything we have done and were mostly pleased. Yes, we still have many ideas and features we want to introduce to our dog-fight, but it was essential for us to remember that this was only our first milestone, and we have much more work ahead of us. We believe in the lean startup methodology, so it makes sense for us to move forward to the second milestone as soon as we achieved the MVP for the first milestone. Looking back, we might even got too much into a “tunnel vision” with our first milestone, and should have move forward on at earlier stage.

So, what is next?

It was time to start looking at the bigger picture. Our goal is to create a bridge simulator, which means we will need to have more stations. However, we want to grow and expand naturally, meaning that we’ll create the stations based on actual content that exists in the game. At this point, we had two natural growing routes - Weapons and Engineering. Development of the weapons station will be based on our existing weapon system. Developing the engineering station will grow from managing the damage that the ships are receiving during the dog-fight.

Decisions decisions

After some discussions, we have decided that we want to start working on the games engineering aspect. Choosing the weapons would have been the easier choice as we already had the base content and the understanding of how we want to expand it. However, we felt that as engineering is the core content for almost all the systems on the ship (if not all of them), it is more correct to start laying down the foundations for this aspect first.

The next milestone

Engineering is a vast subject, and it is not realistic for us to cover all of it in one milestone. Therefore, we had to choose a narrower subject that will also help us to define the foundations. As mentioned before, after completing the dog-fight milestone, the most natural subject for us to move forward with in the engineering aspect is the damage system. We thought it is a good milestone as by defining the damage system, we’ll need to start defining how the ship is built, how we perceive systems in our game, and how we want to handle damage in general.

So here we are moving to the next milestone – the damage system. In this milestone, we want to define how damage works in our game and have a basic model of this system running as part of our dog-fight.