In case you weren’t around in the Discord chat during the last few hours, the Trello Roadmap was recently updated to to include the plans for the future of the TU’s development since the game is going to be launched into Early Access pretty soon, giving a better perspective of what’s in store.
In the earlier days after the Indiegogo, Trello was basically to be the detailed roadmap of the game with multiple boards for pretty much everything, however was later replaced by a more traditional spreadsheet backlog of the game. Question is, that one didn’t last much longer as well, and it’s hard to know if it’s still even being updated or not.
My suggestion for Early Access is to expand even further on the Trello again, even if it seems like a regression to return to a thing that didn’t work for the developers. Thing is, for the user perspective, Trello is much easier to track the development of a progress than, say, a spreadsheet. There’s no need to remember from the top of the head what wasn’t stretched off the last time the sheet was visited since you can see the activity panel, it allows for a more user-direct feedback with the comment system, as well as it’s pretty to look at. It basically gives a sense of progress and of clean development if done right.
Now, what I’m suggesting here is not to return with a full-on detailed roadmap like the earlier roadmaps were, but give deeper information of stuff that is coming including the small features (like new planned furniture or items, Game World maps, …) . A great example of what looks like it worked before was the original GMT Trello board, which showed even the smaller things that were being worked on as well as a pan of improvements planned for existing Game Worlds and content.
I think adapting a similar idea of the GMT Trello to recently-updated Trello can help users know that the team is working on, and adding smaller features to the board that can be continuously ticked off helps give off that idea, especially to new users that might not have as much trust in the team as the common community does. It also helps the recently-community to find a single place to discover what’s being worked on instead of jumping from board to spreadsheet.
The current per-month system that was added to the board this morning is the most popular from what I’ve seen for roadmaps, and if there’s more stuff planned, I would encourage the team to expand it. Marking cards for the current Plaza Activities with labels and adding other stuff such as plans for Game Worlds, Condos, Items, the smaller stuff.
Hope this doesn’t come off as something useless or nonsensical, but on the earlier days, the Trello really helped knowing much better what was being worked on, especially when the Discord chat wasn’t a thing.