We have a few more things to add to the HellFreeze expansion to consider it complete. There’s a small patch in the next couple of days and there’s going to be another one pretty soon to add the offline skilling functionality I spoke about in the previous activity report.

On the offline skilling feature, I wanted to stress that we are very aware of the need to do this properly and we will take very careful steps as to not upset the balance of the game. There will be several more meetings and brainstorming sessions on this before it’s tested and we put it out.  We will also be asking for feedback on this feature before we finalize things and after the functionality is in place it’s very easy to make quick changes if needed.

In today’s activity report we’ll give you a quick look at the development process here at Aventurine: We use agile software development methods, and more specifically we use Scrum.  We ended the planning meetings last week and this week we broke up in eleven teams. Each team has a team leader, a set of specific tasks to achieve and contains members which may be on more than one team. This is roughly what the teams will be working on for the next Scrum session (called a sprint) which is going to run for the next couple of weeks:

• Team 1 is going to be working on activities having to do with streamlining the world for the next expansion.
• Team 2 will work on player character optimizations.
• Team 3 on motion capture animations.
• Team 4 on engine updates having to do with game visuals.
• Team 5 is working on the offline skilling, and on diplomacy and clan tools.
• Team 6 is working on environmental sounds.
• Team 7 is working on game logic updates having to do with resolving some issues and bugs, and tools for GMs.
• Team 8 is doing work and research related to the user interface.
• Team 9 has been working on server control tools for several weeks already.
• Team 10 is working on events, quests and various other related activities.
• Team 11 is working on the design and features of the next expansion.

There are a couple of extra teams which are going to be working on future plans beyond the next expansion but this work will be done periodically since we have to focus on what’s coming next. At the end of each sprint we all gather up in the large meeting room on the ground floor of the Aventurine offices, we demonstrate our work to each other and discuss our progress. After the next one we’ll probably be able to discuss the results of this sprint in more detail.

We hope this small glimpse into our process was interesting to you and it puts things into perspective as far as our general direction for the next few weeks.

Thank you for reading