Appreciate that. As a former forum admin/mod, since the mid 90's and onwards, it always tickles me to get a lurker to post. Welcome!+1 for Gifs from another lurker. I came for the info and stayed for the humor![]()
I hope the answers that podcat provided for your questions helped to clear things up a bit.Could you explain a bit how you define "balance" in terms of this game and how it's getting tested?
I've tried a number of different resource managament tools and haven't come across one that can handle our complexity in a way that actually helps and saves me time.Do you not use JIRA's time management or maybe a plugin? There's quite a few though at the moment our development team isn't mature enough to start doing this with the time estimates due to various contract issues. (most are contractors)
To give everyone an idea of the complexity we keep mentioning:
The main complication that we face, which is a well known issue in the games industry... is that there are so many different professions involved in getting one feature done.
A common scenario is (simplified, believe it or not):
- A new feature starts out with a designer.
- Then it's taken over by a coder.
- Then handed off to a UX Designer.
- Then back to a coder. (preferably the same one)
- And art (Which in this example could be started at the same time.)
- Then AI.
- Then Content Design.
- One final pass for a coder.
- Then QA
- Who most likely hands it back to the coder.
- QA again
- And so on.
And only a limited amount of people in each profession.
Making sure that nobody is blocked from doing their part by someone else is a... (biting back from not using foul language here) ...challenge.
There are certain tools and data that I don't have access to here at Paradox that would help. https://www.gooddata.com, to mention one. (You can use this to produce various reports, burndowns etc, that are far superior to JIRAs build-in ones.)
As our teams and projects grow; I see us exploring this area more in the future.
This would be opening a Pandora's box, I'm affraid.Also, @KimchiViking , if you guys are using JIRA and trying to determine new features et al. Would it be helpful to put issues out to us to vote on?