Goblinworks struck their second milestone for Pathfinder Online earlier this month, keeping the studio on schedule to hit number three. In their latest update, Goblinworks discussed their new “agile development” strategy, one of which includes reducing the number of tasks that need to be completed to reach the Early Enrollment for Kickstarter donors. As with anything in game development, things can change and the devs are remaining flexible if they need to make adjustments to ensure that their goals are met.

Before each milestone, the leadership team (Mark, Lee and Mike) sit down and map out what they can reasonably achieve in the next three months, as well as some stretch goals. That is measured against the whole project plan to be sure that we're making adequate progress vs. the overall Early Enrollment goal. So long as the consensus is that we're on schedule, all is well. (If the consensus is that we have a problem, we'll have to evaluate our options—hiring more staff, expanding the resources we're using for the project, extending our deadline, or reducing the scope of the Early Enrollment target). The goal of each milestone is a playable "deliverable." We should be able to sit down with the game at the end of each milestone and have a reasonably coherent play experience that has evolved substantially since the prior milestone deliverable.

The first milestone was all about putting the tools into place and switching to the Unity engine while the second focused on the first iteration of many of the core game systems. Milestone 3, jokingly referred to by the devs as Kielbasa (for its focus on polish, polish, polish), is all about polishing the existing work from the first two milestones and iterating a bit more.

There’s a lot going on with the development, so be sure to check out the full update for all the details.

Source: Pathfinder Online Milestone 2 Update