Stardock Magazine

March 2020

by Brad Wardell

## Contents ##

• How Stardock is working from home
• CursorFX added to Object Desktop
• Star Control Roadmap
• Guided tour of Stardock

## How Stardock is working from home ##

This is a crazy situation we find ourselves in. 

I hope this newsletter finds you healthy and safe. 

So last week the governor of Michigan, which is the state in the US that we have our main office in, ordered all businesses closed with a handful of exceptions. 

We happen to be fortunate enough that we’ve had external artists and developers for years.  So we have a pretty good idea of how to get things done from remote.  But we’ve never had to do it at this scale. Below, I’m going to outline what we’re doing.  I hope you find this information helpful.

Jira

Crucial in making this all work is a web tool called Jira. It’s all cloud based and super easy to set up.  Once you create your “project,” you can invite others over via their email address. You can create as many projects as you want with it.

First, I start with a road map.  What are the things I want to get done?

Then, I break that down into tasks (issues). 

Now, I won’t get into Sprints and such. How you want to set up your deadlines requires a bit more discussion than this article is intended to get into.  What I will say is that you want to be able to hand out issues to people. 

What we do is create a backlog of tasks.  Each task has a story point associated with it. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, or 13 points, depending on the complexity.  The story points aren’t intended to be specific time required, but we tend to aim for everyone to finish between 8 to 10 story points per week.  The key is to be consistent with your assigning of story points.

From there, it’s a matter of spending a little time to make sure everyone has enough tasks (issues) assigned to them and making sure that they are finishing enough tasks in a week (or whatever your time frame is). This way, you don’t end up with people stressing out at home not knowing what they should be doing and everyone knows what the expectations are.

There is a lot of communication stuff in there as well, where pictures, video, and such can be inserted.

So here you see me and Skittles (our marketing manager) talking about a virtual tour of the company offices (that is included later in this newsletter).  This task is 1 story point.  This week (as I type this), I have finished 12 story points total.  I’ll probably get to 14.  The key is to let people know how many story points you expect them to finish a week (8 to 10) and to try to be as specific as possible.

MS Teams

The other major tool we’re using is Microsoft Teams.  A lot of people use Slack.  We’re a Microsoft shop already, so Teams was a bit easier for us to set up. 

Now, on my setup, I live with Stardock’s Groupy app.  If you don’t have Groupy, do yourself a favor and go get it.  It lets you treat all windows the same as you do web pages (group them together as tabs).

What is handy about Teams versus say, Skype, is that a given team has channels and those channels can have different pages navigated to with tabs.  You can add new pages and give them their own purpose.

It even hooks in with Jira.

It makes secure file management a breeze, as you can share documents with just your team without any additional setup.

Best of all, the video calling is absolutely rock solid.

Between Jira and Teams, we have a pretty good remote setup going. There are lots of other things we have set up, including VPN, Perforce, GitHub, etc.  But those are a bit more specific for software companies.

I hope this helps!

## CursorFX added to Object Desktop ##

I’m happy to announce that CursorFX is not only getting a major new version (v4.0), but that it is now also part of Object Desktop.

The rewrite of CursorFX required some doing given how much Windows has changed since it was first developed.

We have managed to keep the existing cursors compatible in this age of high-DPI displays by using all kinds of evil to handle scaling (including for multiple monitors with different DPIs). But we are working on and releasing new cursors that are natively high-DPI friendly.  We include a few with the beta.

If you don’t have Object Desktop, get it now!  It includes Groupy, Fences, Start10 and more.  Plus, you get everything we release on it for the following year for free.

->Visit www.objectdesktop.com

## Star Control Roadmap ##

Back in 2018, we released the reboot of the Star Control franchise called Star Control: Origins.  We also re-released the classic DOS games onto Steam.

We then developed an expansion pack for it that we broke up into 4-parts called Earth Rising.  This turned out to be a dumb idea, because while the expansion is pretty meaty, it’s not meaty enough to be broken into 4 parts.  So, we won’t be doing that ever again.  But the good news is that Earth Rising is out now and like I said, it is quite meaty.

Now that Earth Rising is finished, we’re working on porting it to consoles.  We have the XBOX One version pretty far along (they got us the dev kit first).  Our hope is to release that later this year.

After the console version is completed, we plan to move onto the sequel title.  For the sequel, we’re collaborating with the original developers of the DOS game on design and creatives.  We’ve already talked at length about ideas on how to make sure Star Control evolves with the changing way people play games.  We have no ETA for the sequel yet other than to say it’s still years away.

In the meantime, if you don’t already have Star Control: Origins, you can get it via Steam, GOG, or direct.

->Visit www.starcontrol.com

## A Guided Tour of Stardock ##

With everyone working from home, we had a rare opportunity to take some pictures of our offices to share with you what our lives at work are like.

>>A Guided Tour of Stardock