Sunless Skies' development map released

Sunless Skies, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Sunless Sea, recently raised nearly £400,000 on Kickstarter, despite only having a £100,000 goal. Developer Failbetter Games is aiming to release the game in Early Access and has released a development roadmap outlining upcoming plans in two week segments.

Failbetter explained in a post on their website that they focus on different aspects of the game every two weeks, these chunks called 'sprints'. For example, in their current sprint, the content team is working on The Reach region, while the art guys are working on the first locomotive designs and the initial UI pipeline set up. A few weeks down the line, the art guys will have moved onto beginning art and animation greyboxing and the gameplay folk will be working on combat AI specifications for tactics.

They've written an addendum of things that are important to consider when reading the roadmap however. They mention that game development is "quite a fluid process", and that "some tasks turn out to be more complicated than anticipated." It's also rare that they will expect to complete a significant component during just one of these sprints, such as all of the combat or writing, as they take multiple sprints to do.

They also pay attention to a lot of player feedback. "Time for polish at the end is also key. Since game development is iterative, production schedules are basically set as a skeleton of what needs to be achieved. Once we start getting player feedback, we can confirm what is working and what isn't, make adjustments, and then flesh everything out with final art, prose, audio and animation," the post explains.

Every time the team completes a sprint, Failbetter has said they'll be updating the roadmap with what was accomplished, along with a link to a more detailed blog post. You can read the full roadmap here and learn more about the game on their Kickstarter page.

Is this transparency appreciated?