Article
Feature Complete? Part 1
Football Superstars has just reached a major point in the development process. This “milestone” is what game developers call “Feature Complete”. Feature Complete is the period of a video game project where the features that will make it into the final build of the game have been finalised and agreed upon.
The development team at Monumental have been working on Football Superstars at the Nottingham, UK office since September 2005. The team of designers, programmers, artists, service and administrative personal have generated a huge amount of great ideas on how to make Football Superstars the most innovative, exciting and entertaining Massively Multi-player Online Football game possible.
Obviously all those great ideas can’t make it into the game at launch. The team have to decide which features have to be included in the launch version of the game and what features will be included in a future patch or update after the game has gone live. The development team have now agreed upon and finished initial development of all the features that will make it into the Football Superstars games that players will get to see at launch.
It is always a tough decision for a development team choosing which features make it into the final launch version of the game and which have to be put on the shelf for later. Every member of the team has an interest in various features and the each team member has their own favourite features that they have worked on, proposed or just think are cool. Whilst all the ideas we have come up with will eventually make it into the game there comes a point where the team have to choose a mix of features that are going to be the most fun to play with in the final game.
The team at Monumental are now dedicated to making the final features included in the launch version of the game as stable, secure and entertaining as possible for players at launch. At feature complete the entire team now move from new feature development to a whole range of processes and procedures that allow the final features to be tested internally, externally with professional testers and beta players and to polish and balance those features ready for launch into the market for players of the game to enjoy.
Players will be able to enjoy the fruits of the labour of the development team as they get ready to move the game from internal development, testing and experimentation to getting the game ready for external testing, bug fixing and eventually Beta testing. In the next few months the team will test all the final features for bugs and move them to a stage where they can get evaluated by first internal testers then a team of professional external testers and over the next few months into the hands of real players in our official Beta testing period.
The team are extremely excited about this period of game development and are looking forward to giving players access to the Football Superstars game and begin playing all the features they have worked on for so long.
