Roadmap

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Shadowrun Awakened is taking an iterative and incremental approach to building its Game Applications and Assets. For this project, we will be tracking overall goals with "milestones", a set of criteria that allows us to monitor progress by categorizing the stages of growth in the project.

Current Milestone

The current milestone is Demo. This first release focuses on working out an assets pipeline into the UDK, mastery of UnrealScript, and basic integration with outside technology.

Milestones

The foreseeable long-term goals of the project have been broken up into the following large steps:

• Demo - Once we have enough features from the Game mechanics, we will release a 30-60 minutes single-player experience.

• Alpha - A prototype multi-player experience. The prototype requirements are outlined as Shadowrun Arena Brawl, a capture the flag game using rules originally laid in the Shadowrun universe. This prototype will focus on game mechanics and technical hurtles, not community building or scalable requirements. This includes refining a process to move content from the minds of developers, through assets, and into the game.

• Beta - Once we have 1 complete storyline, some open play elements, and a resilient and reliable system, we will go live with a server and start with invitation-based persistent play. This is our first impression with the community. During this time, we want to not only stress test the technology, but numerous assumptions made during the process of constructing game mechanics. We should be somewhat stubborn to change here, despite the fact that we want to test our hypotheses; remember that every variable we change in the system takes time to not only change (development time), but also the change may take time to take effect in the community. During this time, worldwide resets should be accepted as a possibility as we begin to make numerous tweaks. The activity of having a Beta testing period is obviously for yet more quality. Beta may move into an open format eventually. Open source projects and free games are known for having interminable Beta programs, so we want special attention paid here to ensuring we continue to make forward progress in development in addition to tuning our system.

• Version 1.0 - All core game mechanics and requirements fulfilled in software. This is when we realize the complete product functioning in software incorporating all three feature lists for 1.0. This includes 3 complete storylines in game content, plus a rich diversity of open play elements. The massive Player versus Player concept, unless affected by findings during Beta, should be implemented by the formal realization of Version 1.0, even if it arrives as a final cycle in Beta.

• Version 2.0 - This describes the concurrent process of always re-examining 1.0 and adding more mechanics and content to flesh out the game for a larger and larger community. Within the project, 2.0 is often used as a bucket to toss in ideas that are good, but not fundamental to SR. "Version 2.0: for the eventualities, not necessities".