As mentioned before, we held our annual team meeting last week-end and as usual, we discussed a broad array of topics ranging from big stuff like our development roadmap all the way to tiny things like whether we should have a new chat system or not. In this post I want to give you a quick overview of and (where possible) a rough timeline for our plans.
Development Roadmap and Feature Survey
I still can't tell you what exactly we're working on. All I can tell you at this point in time is that the rough idea is to release the secret feature some time later this year but that there isn't any specific date. It's a big and very complex topic and we don't want to rush anything. For this reason we asked for your opinion on which features we could or should add or improve in the meantime whenever we find the time for "something smaller". The turnout of our little survey was amazing! We received a lot more input than we had hoped for and we're still busy wading through it. As soon as we have a structured result ready, we'll let you know!
A320NEO and companions
One thing that popped up quite a few times in the responses to our survey was the request for new aircraft models. Work on the A320NEO is mostly complete and research for its sister models and other new types like the CS100 is in progress. We are currently holding back the release of the A320NEO because we want to adjust some of the performance parameters of the existing A320-family models to get a dataset that's more coherent overall. This shouldn't take too much longer though, so stay tuned!
The fate (and return) of Quimby
The current instance of Quimby is about to end in a week's time. Although this isn't the first time-limited game world we've run, we received more requests than usual to keep it open for a bit longer. I'm sorry to say that we can't do this and that Quimby III will end as planned on the 15th. But don't fret: We decided to restart it very shortly after. So mark your calendars: Quimby IV will launch on March the 1st! More details on this will follow as soon as they are available.
AirlineSim Events 2016
In 2015 we were so busy working on AirlineSim that we didn't find the time to organize our traditional community events. We don't want this to happen again and we are already busy finding interesting locations and things to do for our 2016 events. So hopefully we'll all the important information ready over the next few weeks so you can start planning ahead!
Support and User Advisory Board
We don't keep the fact a secret that our support processes leave some room for improvement. We discussed this a lot last week-end and we have a long list of things that we want to change to become better at them. Many of these changes are actually technical in nature and are supposed to make the internal processes and workflows easier for our small support team. Obviously, implementing them will cut into our time budget for development work, but we're confident that it will be time well-spent and that our turnaround times in support and cheating cases will go down dramatically.
On a related note, we would also like to breath new life into the User Advisory Board with new elections coming up this spring. All important information on this, including deadlines, will follow in a separate post as soon as possible.