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With all the Project DEIOS stuff going on I am even later on releasing our roadmap than the year before! So without any further ado, let's start with a little review first and then give you an outlook of what’s coming in 2020.
Let’s put Project DEIOS aside for a minute. Although it is going to be a major influence for our Roadmap 2020, in this part of the review I want to focus on the business development of DGNFOG in the past year.
We can look back on a very successful year, where every aspect of growth has exceeded our expectations so far:
We are more than proud of this development and we are looking forward to see how DUNGEONFOG grows in 2020!
Now that that Project DEIOS is part of our development schedule for 2020, we have added it to the roadmap and I think it is important to point out that it also affects our velocity when it comes to developing new DGNFOG features.
And although we try to make sure that those tasks stay separated and receive an equal amount of attention - there are many crossovers, where tasks from one tool can influence the development of the other.
This can be a positive or negative influence:
Especially later down the road, when we start to implement our battlemap features into the DEIOS application, we will need to make sure that we don’t waste resources on redundant development.
This obviously makes detailed planning very hard, so please understand the following roadmap more like a commitment to things that we want to achieve and less a detailed time table for upcoming releases.
The good and the bad news:
We have already finished all the website & service tasks that are on the roadmap above and they will be rolled out very soon.
But there has been a major drawback in regards to the editor:
We have been working on a major overhaul of our brushes and shapes tools and we wanted to release it in Q1. Unfortunately internal tests have shown that our new tools are still affecting the general performance of the online editor in a way, that makes these updates not ready for live deployment yet. We do not want to release those features until we are certain, that they are working as intended.
However, since we are now entering the hot phase of our Project DEIOS Alpha, we were forced to make a decision: Do we want to invest more resources into the editor features now and risk a major delay in our DEIOS Alpha, or postpone the editor refinement until the DEIOS Alpha has been released.
This was a terribly hard choice because whatever we do, one part of our community will be disappointed. But we feel that risking a major delay for the DEIOS alpha would be the worst of all choices:
So with a heavy heart we are postponing our DGNFOG update to the beginning of the second quarter this year.
While Andi will finish the postponed editor update from Q1 and starts working on the features for Q3, Herbert and Thomas will work on a full website relaunch. We feel that it is time to clean up our website, make it more accessible and improve the design together with a new corporate design for DUNGEONFOG.
We will also finally prioritize our manuals and start working on a user manual wiki and a proper FAQ section.
Based on the improvements we have implemented for the brushes and shapes tools, we want to rework our rooms tool as well. This will allow us to introduce several vital features, like freehand room-drawing, duplicating rooms, walls & floor presets for rooms and many more improvements. We will also implement level duplication and improvements for textures, like a texture pipette to quickly pick up textures and Wang tiles to create dynamic textures.
We are not sure, if we can release all those features together in Q3 but that is at least what we are aiming for.
We don’t feel confident enough to announce tasks for Q4 yet. Last year has taught us that we can’t estimate for all unexpected things coming our way and we don’t want to oversell ourselves. So we decided to wait until summer and see how far we have got.
Then we will release our roadmap for Q4.
There are items on the old roadmap from 2019, that are now missing on this years roadmap.
They are not gone.
But with DEIOS in development they need to reviewed under the following perspective: Do they make sense to be implemented before our battlemap editor will be incorporated into the DEIOS app, or will they be more efficiently developed as part of DEIOS? This is also what we have reserved Q4 for - if we stay within our expected pace, we will have time to address tools like advanced doors and stairs, the gm notes and other things that came short.
Let us know what you think about the Roadmap 2020!
Happy Map Making,
Till
