Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Scott Weston, and I'm here to present my thoughts and approaches on how to build efficiencies into Drupal practices. How has everyone's con gone so far? We made it to the last day of sessions, the last session block. I'm sure there's a lot of session fatigue at this point. But hopefully, I'll be able to give you some really good ideas and information through this presentation. Some of the presentations I've seen, even in the project management track, have been amazing. So I hope that I can provide you with either a good summation of some of the things that you've heard this week, or maybe even give you some new ideas that you can take back to your home organizations. If you want to follow along in the slides today, I have this presentation set up on GitHub. The address is nodeloophole.github.io. And that's my assistant Mordekai. He likes to help me when I do my Drupal coding. And I'll have this URL on the next few slides as well if you want to follow along. As I said before, I'm Scott Weston. I am a solution architect at HS2 Solutions in Chicago. I've been doing Drupal since early Drupal 6. Before going to HS2 Solutions, I led a small Drupal practice also in Chicago. In my free time, I enjoy bowling and darts, and I've recently picked up running, which is going pretty well so far. As I said before, I work at HS2 Solutions. And at HS2 Solutions, we strive to be really a trusted, responsive, and effective digital transformation partner to some of the best companies on the planet. We do this by valuing smart strategy, great design, awesome engineering teams, and working with people that are passionate about what we do and our clients and our partner agencies. So the purpose for my talk today is I want to give you some information and thoughts and ideas about how I've seen that we've made our Drupal practices more efficient. Now, I don't think I'm going to cover anything revolutionary or groundbreaking for you today, but I hope I can provide you with information that you, again, can take back to your practice and help it become more efficient. And I framed the presentation today around four main questions. What types of skills make up a great Drupal team? What are some practical ways that a Drupal team can increase their efficiencies? How can a Drupal team stay motivated when being asked to do a lot of work, especially under deadlines? And how can project managers help with efficiency? So let's just dive right in and start talking about skills. The basics are really straightforward.  So PHP, knowing some Drupal, knowing a lot of Drupal, in some cases, CSS, JavaScript, Symphony, Git, those just kind of meat and potatoes things. And then there's also the related skills, which are the frameworks, knowing some DevOps if needed, some server management, knowing things like search APIs, knowing how to interact with REST or SOAP. Those sorts of related skills are always helpful.  I think it's just kind of a term of art. And these are skills that aren't easily measured. They're not objectively measured. They're more subjective. And these skills are sometimes overlooked, maybe in the interview process, or overlooked if a developer or someone on the team is a rock star in many other ways, but they're lacking some of these skills. I say that some of these soft skills can be just as important as the direct skills that an individual may have. And as we go through these skills, if you see these traits that people have, you can see how having them can help your team function at higher level and with more efficiency. I think the first and most common one that everyone mentions is communication. So this is, can an individual articulate ideas and thoughts speak up if they're having problems? Do they engage in active listening? And do they understand the message being conveyed to them and understand really what they're conveying to other people? Another kind of facet to this is using the correct voice. So an example I like to give is if you have two developers that are talking to one another, they're going to have a really technical conversation using very technical terms. And packed into that are a lot of assumptions of what the other person knows. But if you put a developer in a situation where they need to explain a technical concept or a technical framework to someone who's less technically minded, you want to ensure that your developers can do that and not be too abrasive about it or to condescending about it at times if someone doesn't know a technical term or concept. So you really want to look for those people that can articulate those things. Another facet of another trait of people that I like to find is have people that have a bias towards action. And this is just people, someone that is ready to get their hands dirty and start solving problems. As we probably all know in Drupal, there are 10 ways to do any single thing. And there does need to be a balance between research and discussions and actually taking the action to do it. So you want to find people that know how to do the right amount of research and deliberation and then make a decision and run with it. You want to try to avoid situations where you put someone in a space where they have decision paralysis if they have 15 different options of a way to approach something and they can't make a decision. You want to make sure that you are empowering people and giving them the confidence that they need to know that you're going to stand behind the decision that they make and you're going to work with them to see that decision and that approach through to the end. Another trait that people I feel need to exude when they are working on a team is the trait of constant learning and constant mentoring. So you want to find people and you want to encourage in people a growing knowledge and experience, growing their knowledge and experience to a higher level. Someone who is constantly striving to learn more and learn more about their craft, learn more about the related skills is better prepared to solve potential problems before they become really big problems. And this proactive response to situations helps minimize rework, bugs, and problems down the road. Someone that recognizes the value of sharing information with others is an asset to your team as well. They know that doing so, sharing information, elevates everybody, elevates the entire team. And in that respect, your team as a whole becomes more knowledgeable and more efficient. And someone who takes ownership knows their responsibility to see a task through to completion. If they don't have the necessary resources or information, they find them or they find it. And as a project manager or another team member, you should have confidence in knowing that when a developer or a team member takes on a task, that they will see it through to completion. Of course, if there are blockers, they should surface those to the team. And if they are not full blockers, maybe just speed bumps, they should try to work through those so that that task or that assignment can be completed. And a developer or team member should be able to know where their focus should be at any given time. This is particularly useful when, let's say a developer is on multiple projects. Knowing of their competing priorities, which one is most important is critical. Part of focus is also the ability to say no or not right now to incoming requests that don't help achieve the highest priority for that person at that time. And some developers are people pleasers. I know I've fallen to that category at times and if I get requests coming in, I want to be the go-to guy to get things done. So sometimes it's hard to say no to someone, especially if it's a close colleague. But having that skill, that trait to know that I have to do this other thing and I must say no to you for right now, that's important. Also important is the ability to push away distractions and other sources of wanting your attention. So this would be social media, email continually popping up and just going to check it constantly, things like that. Just knowing when to shut those things off and move on to the work at hand that's important. So kind of the takeaways for this section for me are when interviewing job applicants, ask questions that will uncover obviously the direct skills but also some of these soft skills. So for example, assume you are involved in the interview process for a developer and you want to tease out if this person has good communication skills. You could pose a question something like, assume I'm not a technical person, please explain to me how views in Drupal works. And you may know how views works, you may not know how views works, but just from the tone and the content of that response, you should be able to know does this person have the ability to articulate technical concepts in a non-technical way. So you want to frame interview questions around those traits to just know if the candidate is someone that would be well suited for your team. And then with your existing team members, look for opportunities to highlight and encourage and strengthen these strengths when you see one of these behaviors exemplified that you want to enforce within your team. So once you kind of know what you're wanting to look for from the direct skills and the soft skills, another aspect is to just make an assessment of your current state of the Drupal team that you have. And this is an opportunity for you to have a good baseline measure for where your team stands today. And it's also important to be very honest about this.  And it will really inform your organization about the strengths and the weaknesses within your Drupal practice. First, you want to look at technical knowledge. So if we're talking about Drupal practices, we need to assess Drupal skills. And when doing Drupal skills, you want to get really specific. You don't want to just say, do they know Drupal 7? Do they know Drupal 8? Do they know front end? Do they know back end? You want to dive deep into this. And you want to know, ask very specific questions like, does this person have skill creating field formatters? Do they know how to use twig templates? Do they know configuration management? Do they know how to write an event subscriber? Do they know how to work with render arrays? And if the project managers in here can take this information back to the practice leads at your organizations, they'll kind of get the gist of what we're looking for. At HS2, we started a skills assessment of our Drupal team. And I think we had 120 data points that we were collecting on each person related to the skills that they had in very specific areas. So you can get very granular with this. And then for courses and certifications and awards, you'll want to collect and maintain a list of those as new certifications are bestowed upon your team members, add those to the list. And on the last slide, I know I said that this was for internal only, but for the courses and certifications and awards, these can be a really good selling point to potential clients. So they can be very helpful in responses to proposals or asking for proposals. And when someone gets a new award or a new certification or completes a course, that's something that the entire team should be celebrating. You really need to create an atmosphere where victories are celebrated by everyone, not just those that achieve something. Also part of the assessment is domain knowledge is what I'm calling this. And this can include work that members of your team have done in other industries before they worked for you or worked as a developer. It can also include the type of websites or types of clients that each individual has worked with. An example here would be, let's say that one of your developers worked at a financial firm, an accounting firm, before arriving at your door. They may have some information about regulatory matters related to financial firms that when you're trying to pitch to an accounting firm to do their website, they may have some, not necessarily insider information, but they have some insight into some of those things. And you can surface that during the pitch to let your client know that you have expertise within that domain. And that can definitely help the selling process. And also knowing this kind of information can be helpful in knowing how to staff new projects that are coming in as well. For assessing the Drupal talent on your Drupal team, some takeaways here. After you've done this, you should have a sense of what type of work to go for and which ones would be the low hanging fruit to go after. You should have a good metric of your team's strengths and weaknesses and being able to find ways to improve. You should be able to identify some concrete next steps that your team should take to help them level up. And kind of at the culmination of all this, you should have a nice roadmap for improving your team. And it's more than just having that roadmap, you need to work it and get the knowledge and information and experience leveled up so that your team as a whole increases its knowledge. So getting into the guts of what we're talking about today is increasing efficiency in your Drupal process. And I'm gonna take one step back and just highlight that efficiency and productivity are not the same thing. They are related, but those terms should not be used interchangeably. Productivity is a measurement of number of units produced. Number of units produced could be number of lines of code, number of tickets cleared, number of story points completed in a sprint. It could be anything along those lines. And then efficiency is how much resources or how many resources were used in the production of that unit. And the way to increase efficiency is to reduce waste within the system. And when we're talking about development and programming, waste could be a very specific example would be dealing with a slow development environment. If you could speed up the development environment, you might gain some efficiencies there or reducing the amount of bugs that are generated or the amount of refactoring that is needed because of maybe ambiguous requirements or some improper assumptions that were made on behalf of a developer when looking at wireframes. So anything you can do to reduce the waste within the system, you increase the capacity to do production to produce more. So with that in mind, as I keep talking about efficiency, know that I'm wanting to give you the tools that you need to increase that efficiency so that you can produce more with the same amount of time and staff that you have now. So before project even starts to build, it's good to have a meeting with the build team and just make sure that everybody agrees on the work to be done. And this can highlight what's in scope, what's not in scope. So for example, if you have wireframes that contemplate multiple phases of a project and we're talking about phase one right now, be sure to highlight the things within the wireframes or within the requirements that are out of scope in that current phase. And I'm gonna stick a pin in that, talking about multiple phases. I'm gonna come back to that a little later. Another common point for everyone to be on the same page about is what does done look like for this project? Is it a proof of concept? Is it an MVP? Or is it a fully fleshed out site? So as long as everyone's on the same page, what done looks like, that helps keep everyone focused in the right direction. And then have common names for everything on the project. So a perfect example I can give is I was recently on a project for a website and I'm gonna use ambiguous terms to talk about this. We have this thing at the top of the page that had a big hero image and some text on it and every five seconds it switched out to another image. I called it a hero rotator. Someone else on the team was calling it a carousel. Someone else was calling it a slideshow. And we had these terms in our head about what we were calling this thing. And so we were having a meeting and I was talking about a hero rotator and my colleague was talking about a carousel and I thought he was talking about something else. So we had to like have a level set of, okay, this is the thing we're talking about, right? The thing, and we had to point on the wireframe to this is the thing. So if you can have common understanding of what things are called, that's great. Another example is with more than one client of mine and I've worked with, they call a region on a page that does something like a newsletter sign up form or related stories, a block on the page that does something, they call that a module. And in the Drupal space, a module is something totally different. So even aligning what you're calling things between the client and the team is helpful and you may have to make a translation table and say, okay, when the client says module, they mean this just so that there's a common understanding so that there's no miscommunication or reducing the possibility for miscommunication among the team and with the client. Also before the build starts, there should be a solid plan. The lead developer or the architect, the Drupal architect for that project should create a plan for the team to follow. And in this, you should resolve as many unanswered questions as possible. A smart Drupal architect or senior developer, lead developer will be able to look at wireframes, look at requirements and really have some long-distance vision and try to ask questions that can be problems later on, especially if wireframes don't have 100% fidelity if they were just kind of inspirational wireframes, so to speak. And along with the plan should be a solid content model and that includes things like content types, taxonomy vocabularies. I would also say roles and permissions, modules to use, modules that will need to be built, custom things. And I do wanna point out a few years ago, I think maybe more than a few years ago, Palantir.net published a blog post and I've linked it here and you can get it in the slides as well, to a blog post about a build specification and they shared a Google doc that is their build specification. And to be honest, it's a little dated, it's for Drupal 7, but it can be, you can copy it and adapt it for your particular needs. I think I would recommend this as a great starting point for creating that kind of nuts and bolts build spec plan. So definitely check that out. Another way to increase efficiency when you're actually doing the build is to have standard tools and processes. So standardize the toolkit for everybody. And I go so far as to say computers, IDE, other software that is used in your practice should all be the same. So if everyone's on Windows or everyone's on Mac or everyone's on Linux, that helps a lot. That means the team can actually help each other and they would in theory have the same problems and be able to help solve those quickly. And then the development environment, everyone should be working on the same type of the development environment, whether it's Acquia Dev Desktop, Drupal VM, or some kind of homegrown, vagrant machine that you have. And it should, aside note, it should closely match as much as possible the actual production environment so that behaviors are the same between Dev and production. And I would also recommend having, across the entire practice the entire organization, having the same project or task management process in place as much as possible. We know for particular clients, for particular projects, there are some little nuances. But insofar as you can, have it the same across the entire organization. And kind of going along with the last point of having Common Toolkit, have a common starting point for all of your projects. And this is probably some of the most drooply stuff that I'm going to be talking about today. So I can describe what we do at HS2 Solutions in some detail. So maybe this gives you some inspiration or ideas that you can take back. So at HS2 Solutions, we have a base Drupal installation profile that we use for Drupal 7 sites and Drupal 8 sites. And what we've kind of baked into our secret sauce in this installation profile are the modules that we know 90% of our sites are going to install just a matter of doing a website these days. So things like Google Analytics. In Drupal 7, having Path Auto, just any of those kind of common, give me modules that every site has, we have baked in an installation profile that takes care of that. I'm sure many of your organizations do that as well. If you don't, I would recommend going for that. It gives you a common starting point and it gives you, for the industries that you work with, the areas that you work within, the spaces you work within, it gives you a leg up on the build out, which makes things much more efficient. Because one of the things we wanna do is reduce the repetitive work or the duplicative work from one project to the next. And going along with that, don't try to reinvent the wheel. And particularly with ambitious developers, this is a problem sometimes. I can say that from my personal experience in my younger development days. Try to avoid doing things radically different each time you build a site. The example I always like to give is that hero image rotator thing that we were talking about a little bit ago. How many different ways can you really build that? Why are we building it from scratch every time we're building it? Why don't we establish what we're gonna use, whether it's some carousel JavaScript library or some homegrown solution, and let's just run with it. And then we can build on it and iterate on it so to incorporate new features that come in into play for the particular projects that we work on. And leveraging the knowledge you have rather than investigating new things at times is good. Sometimes it's appropriate to do something totally new and totally radical, and that's great. But sometimes it's also good to stay the course. As project managers, this is something I can, for you guys as a developer, talking to project managers, as much as you can, let developers develop. And in your organization, obviously every situation is different. But there are little things that add up in a developer's life really quickly. Things like, oh hey, can you go look at the printer and see if you can make it print my spreadsheet for me? Or meetings where the developer doesn't really have a role or have an objective of takeaways in that meeting. If you have an hour-long status meeting with a client and the developer, you want the developer in there just in case some technical questions come up. It might be a better use of time to let the developer develop for that hour and then have a 15-minute follow-up with the appropriate stakeholders if there are some technical questions that come out of a meeting. Things like that. And it's also okay to have specialists on your staff. And I'm not talking about putting people into a silo. So if someone says, okay, Scott, you know search APIs like nobody else in this organization. So any project that does search, we're putting you on that project. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is knowing that I'm that resource, knowing that Scott's that resource, if someone has questions or problems or needs pointers on how to address search API questions, for example, and surfacing that to the entire team so that you have that well of resources across the team that others can plug into. This one's kind of a gimme. Follow good development practices. So do the basics, do them well. This includes coding standards, peer review, documentation, doing things the Drupal way. And how this really helps with efficiency is if I'm airdropped into another project, I don't have to orient myself with how the project is built. If I know we're following coding standards, I know how to find the code that I need to find. If we're doing things the Drupal way, I know what hooks to look for or what event subscribers to look for, what, you know, if the organization follows certain naming conventions for custom modules, I know what to look for. So that can help with efficiency, especially when transitioning off or onto new projects. Next is to build with the future in mind. And a little while ago, I said I was gonna put a pin in wireframes that had future phases baked into it. So I'm coming back to that now. So where possible, if you know where the site or the project is going that you're building out, and you can lay that foundation today in phase one for phase two, that's a great win for you and the team as well as for the client. Example I like to give for that is, let's say that you're building on a site that has kind of a help and how-to section, just articles about how to do random things. And let's say in phase one, you're going to have a field that is a skill level. So basic, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. And in phase one, it's just going to appear as a label at the top of the article, that this is an intermediate article, for example. The easy route is to just build a select list field and populate it with beginner, intermediate, and advanced, and then just display it. But if you know in phase two that there's going to be a help and how-to landing page where some dynamic content will need to come into play, maybe a full description about what the difference between basic and intermediate and advanced is, you might want to go ahead and build that out as a vocabulary, a taxonomy vocabulary, and create that entity reference. That way when phase two comes along, you don't have to do any data migration, you don't have to destroy anything that you built in phase one, and you've laid the ground work with minimal additional effort for that future phase. Another aspect is to invest in everyone's continued growth, and this is talking about experience as well as just knowledge. So investing in training and education within your organization, encouraging people to attend or you may be even hosting local events like meetups or camps, and then also having internal training. So just at HS2 Solutions, we have a quarterly Drupal meetup that's just internal to the company. So we all converge on home base, and we have a one day or two day meeting where we talk about how we do Drupal, what projects we've worked on, things that we've learned, and just a really good internal information share. It's basically like a mini camp, but it's just for our company. And that springboards into contributing back to the wider Drupal community through presentations at camps and cons. And also for project managers here, as much as you can help people avoid multitasking as much as possible. So this is working on multiple projects, seemingly at the same time. There are definitely real time costs to task switching. So it's better to time box efforts into larger chunks if possible. And as much as developers will fuss and fight, if you know you're gonna have multiple meetings with a developer over the course of a day because of project kickoffs and status meetings and that, try to schedule those back to back to back so that everything's compact as far as meetings go. And that gives a bigger chunk throughout the day for doing development work. And you may have to explain the why for that, but that is actually helpful better than having meetings staggered throughout the day where there are seemingly small chunks where a developer could develop. Another one in this one hopefully is common sense and obvious but fix bugs immediately as they're uncovered. If you build on top of bugs, it may cause more bugs and then you'll have like an infestation and that's not good. And if you ever hear the phrase we'll fix it in QA, it's a very dangerous phrase to hear and you definitely want to tamp that down and get that idea out of people's head as quickly as possible. Litting bugs linger can only cause more problems. So for increasing efficiency, some takeaways, look for opportunities within your Drupal process to increase efficiency. Look for the things that are inefficient. Try to eliminate duplicate or repetitive effort where possible, try to automate some things, get some nice starting points set up for the practice and invest in people, letting them work and also let them work the work. Those are kind of the key takeaways for me in keeping the team efficient. And sometimes developers are called upon to do some pretty heroic things related to timelines, working a lot and that sort of thing. So how do you keep the team motivated? And you want to avoid overworking people and you also want to give them something new and exciting to work on. So what can we do? And some of these are pretty basic. One is strive for daily productivity, daily production. When I do a task decomposition for a project, I try to keep any single task at less than one day to complete. So if you have a task that's like a multi-day task that you know is gonna take 12 or 14 hours or longer to complete, try to break that down into smaller chunks. And if you look, you definitely can find ways of doing that. And there's two reasons for this. One is it gives developers the ability to check something off and say, yesterday I completed this thing. And instead of, the other aspect of it is also, if you give someone too much, too big of a bite to chew, they don't know where to start on it at times. So definitely try to break things down as much as possible. Also try to, as much as possible, encourage a good work-life balance. While I can initially be productive, working lots of hours can be inefficient with increased stress, mistakes, bugs, things are missed. And it's really not sustainable in the long term. Another thing to do is make sure that everyone knows why they are doing something. You don't have to be, sometimes it's obvious, the why, you know, why am I building this content type? That's kind of an obvious thing. But sometimes if you hear someone say, well, why am I doing this? That's a sign that that person is ready to be demotivated, that they're looking for a reason to lose their motivation to work on that project. So it's good to have a conversation and explain why or how what that developer is doing fits into the larger picture. And you could also tease out maybe better ways of approaching something. Maybe the why am I doing this is actually a way for a developer to say, I could do it this other way and it would be better. So you might have to have some conversations and figure out, you know, make sure that everyone knows how their piece fits into the overall picture. And lastly for this, I just want to, you know, just a nice reminder, developers aren't just resources, we're people too. So check in with developers and make sure that they're happy on the project. You know, sometimes what we do isn't innovative and exciting, sometimes it's just, you know, to just be totally honest, sometimes we're just building a website, you know, but just make sure that developers are, they're engaged and they're happy on the project and talk with developers about things that aren't the project. You know, get to know them, build a rapport that helps build the team morale, the camaraderie of the team, of the project team. And that can have great payoffs maybe when a project goes sideways and people have to work a little more than they'd like. So, you know, takeaways for this would be, you know, help developers be productive as much as possible while maintaining good balance in their life, helping them maintain balance in their lives. And, you know, make sure developers know how what they're doing advances the project, it advances the larger goals for the organization and let them know that their work is meaningful in many ways. So here's the kind of the last section for this presentation. And this is me as a project manager and as a lead at HS2 and as a practice leader at other organizations, some things that I've seen and want to describe for you about how project managers can help with efficiency. And most of these are probably review for the more astute project managers in the group, especially since I've heard a lot of this information in other sessions at this con. So we'll try to cover these pretty quick. One is don't allow a site build to start too soon. Sometimes I know there's a lot of pressure, particularly when timelines and deadlines are involved, to start building before scope and requirements are fully locked down. Pushback against this as much as possible, it helps avoid rework and unscoped work and having to tear things down and build them again in a different way. And also if you need some leverage to get sign off on something or to get some resources, this is kind of like your last carrot to say, okay, we're not gonna build until we get this thing from you. So that's one item.  Developers can get really excited about wanting to try new things or new approaches or use a new technology. And at times that's really good. It's really good to encourage innovation but on some projects with tight timelines or smaller budgets that may not be in the cards. So staying in the course may be beneficial in that case. And also tease out when developers are having problems. You standups and status meetings to ask questions about do you need any help to complete this task? Do you have all the information that you need? And just ask point blank, are you spending your wheels on this? Are you stuck in that decision paralysis? Do you need to talk with another developer to work through some issues related to a technical approach? Also find out if they're getting sideswiped by other people within the organization for doing either working on another project or doing a business proposal or something like that. And definitely, and I think this is a common thread for this con in the project management track is have transparency with the whole team. Don't shield developers. Me personally, I don't like being shielded from the numbers. I wanna know how the project is going. Number of the velocity of the completion or how we're working against the budget. I find that information really helpful for me. And it helps as a developer me know if I need to work a little quicker, to maybe find ways to shave some time off of some tickets. So that's very helpful. And it keeps everyone abreast of the latest information, how the client is feeling. And I think last for this would be let developers show off their own work. Not all developers wanna be behind the scenes. Some do, and that's okay. Me personally, I like having that great one-on-one interaction with the client. So when you're demoing something, let the developer that built the thing do the demo for the client or the stakeholder. It builds ownership. At the beginning of this presentation we talked about you want people that take ownership. This is a great way to instill ownership.  So it gives the developer pride to show that off. Gives them ownership to make sure that that is done as well as possible. And it helps build rapport with the client. Especially if the stakeholders that you're dealing with are other IT people, it can really spur some great conversations. And it can even spur discussions about new work to be done in a future phase. So for the project managers, look at the project management process and see how you could help increase efficiency when dealing with Drupal projects. And also work with the developers, help them become more efficient and so far as you can. And help them elevate their craft. And finally, kind of the takeaways, hopefully for you in this presentation is know where your team stands, currently related to skills and experience. Determine some next steps for the Drupal practice to help it increase efficiency. And implement those changes into the Drupal process and the project management process. Implement changes that do facilitate better efficiency so that you as a team can be more productive. And with that one thing, two housekeeping things, you may have heard there are some contributions prints tomorrow. You don't have to be a developer to contribute. If you're not technical with Drupal, you can help write documentation or things like that. And I'd really like some feedback on this presentation. Hopefully you learned one or two little nuggets that you can take back to your home base. On the screen here is the link to the survey. And finally, thank you. I appreciate your time. And if you have any questions or if you have any information to share that may help others in the room, there's a microphone over here and we'll go from there. Sure. Yeah, the question is what tools do we use to help facilitate collaboration? At HS2 solutions, we're in on the Atlassian Suite, so we use JIRA, Confluence. Those are the keys, the two biggest ones that we use for collaboration and task management. We do include the clients on those and they don't have access to every facet. They can get reports. They can see the current sprint, the swim lanes on the current sprint. We use a command board for that. But we do include them on that. And typically, we have a few points of contact that have access to that on the client side. Everyone on the team at HS2 has access, but maybe one or two key people like a project manager on that side or a key stakeholder on that side has access. I'll just repeat it. Okay, the question was when someone has bench time between projects, how do you keep them motivated and not have some large-scale internal investment on things? At HS2, when someone does have, we call it bench time. We have a project board that's internal that is improvements to our base installation or to our development environment. And we'll try to put people to do things on that. It could be like add some scaffolding for creating this type of page or that type of page. So just little things that can be bite-sized so that if someone only has a day or two of downtime between one project moving on to another one, there are something that they can do. And you mentioned doing research, going back to that. Definitely the investment in the continued growth, have them take a course or take a class. But the flip side is we'll pay for you to take that course, but you're gonna do an info-share with the group about what you learned. And that can be helpful as well because you do have that actual cost of someone not being billable, but at least you can get some payback for the entire group by learning what they do. Is that helpful? Okay, great. Yes? Yeah, that can be a challenge, especially for the rock stars that are like wanted on every project. I'm sorry? Oh, the question is how do you make sure that developers have that time for their own investment in growing their knowledge and experience? And it can be a challenge. Again, like when you have the rock star developers that every project manager wants on that project, on their project. And you have to be regimented and say, okay, one day a month, the equivalent of one day a month or two days a month, we're setting aside for you to invest in yourself, to do professional development. And that's one good way. And we also, we do hackathons and other kind of lunch and learns. We call them where everyone gets lunch and tries to learn something over lunch. So there are definitely opportunities. You just have to, for some people, you have to be creative and be very deliberate about how you do that for them so that they do have that opportunity to do it. Yes? Mm-hmm. Yeah, to answer the first question, no, I can't share it. But a guide that I will give you is look at the AQUIA certification tests. They have study guides. That's a good guide mark to use for creating that. And we did a couple of different things. One is the Drupal Practice Lead at HS2 evaluated everybody. I'm not the Drupal Practice Lead at HS2. And then we also had everyone evaluate themselves. That's good reflective time for a developer to sit back and acknowledge where their strengths are. And you might find areas that someone says, oh, I know a lot about this thing, but they've never been asked or they never spoke up. So that's one good way. And based on that, we kind of did some trends and said, okay, we're kind of light in this area or that area. And that gives us a good place to focus and effort. So then when someone does have some bench time, a day or two of bench time, we say, why don't you do a little research on the new workflow initiative or the new media that's coming out so that we know we have someone who has research and has hands-on experience with it, even in a sandbox, and someone that can help elevate everyone's knowledge on that. And I think there was another question? Yeah, kind of. Unfortunately, forecasting and pipelines are out of my realm of experience, so I don't think I could provide a meaningful answer for you for that. That would be the Practice Lead at HS2 and other Practice Leads within our company. They work on that. Mm-hmm. We have done something very similar. We have productized some of our work. We keep it outside of the installation profile, but we have a few things, a few tricks up our sleeves as far as some layout management and that that we've productized so that when a client has something that has a desire to have something that fits what we do or what we have that product for, we can use that as and say, for X dollars, this is what you get, and then we'll build on that and customize it for you. That is, speaking of efficiency, that's ridiculously efficient because we sell it for a price and we just turn it on and then configure it and customize it for them. Mm-hmm. Yes, yeah, we haven't gone the full distro, the full-fledged distro route just because sometimes, you know, sites kind of diverge and go off in their own little ways that don't fit nicely with the distro and we don't want to have problems with that down the road if we need to build in, you know, if we need to do some updates or something like that. Yeah, it's flexible enough for what we do. Yeah, we got it. Yeah, thanks for the great presentation. Two questions related to kind of just very practical communications. What's the best intervention tactic when someone says that we'll fix it in QA or UAT? Do you throw like a pencil at the person or do you say that let's reconsider or post that? I would say, you know, oh, we'll fix that in QA. No, we won't, we'll fix that now. And, you know, just being direct and maybe explain, you know, kind of how I described, if we let this bug linger, it can cause more problems and just really explain the why for that. And yeah, it can be hard to shove a bug ticket into a really tight sprint, but it's something that needs to be done for the overall health of the project. Okay, and this probably goes also to the explaining the why, but you mentioned that if there is kind of demands and pressure in certain situations, you try to push back, but I was just thinking, how do you do that while still keeping the stakeholders happy? That's something for the project managers to manage and not, I will happily punt to the group here if you have any tips or tricks on that. Pushing back on pressure for starting a build with a tight deadline and keeping the client happy at the same time. Thank you. Organize more efficiently, so these things work, we would want the developer only for support, but if we get them operated, we will use one day at a week, so how do you do that? It's a balancing act, it's hard. You know, you can go and say, okay, developer, maybe junior developer, we're putting you on maintenance until, you know, you build up some skills, but then that can be, kind of feel like pigeonholing them or siloing them into that, and that definitely can be demotivating. I've experienced that with some other developers that I've worked with in other organizations. You know, I think time boxing for maintenance tasks is good. You mean, obviously, yeah, yeah, number of hours over the course of a sprint, you know, even on maintenance, we try to do two-week iterations and say, you know, obviously if your site crashes or if there's a critical bug, we'll fix it as soon as we can, but you know, if we have this backlog of things that we want, that we know you want to get done, let's pick three things that we'll do, and if something else more important comes in, you let us know and we'll get, you know, we'll prioritize that above the others, but otherwise, within the next two weeks, we'll have these three things done, and we try to do it that way, and if you bake in kind of the assumption that, yes, Mr. Client, Ms. Client, you have X number of hours with us per month, you know, and they're use it or lose it, then the client will be motivated to make sure that they're staying on top of requests and new features that they want, and, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That way to get that across to people and make sure that they've got awareness, is there, you know, do you document it or visualize it or anything? Yeah, good documentation is definitely helpful. We don't have any kind of visuals on technical debt. We probably should, just to keep it top of mind when we do have some bench time or, you know, a client does have some time with us that they want to use, and they don't know exactly what for, we can help try to reduce some of that debt, but I don't know that I have anything really specific that I can offer for you on that. I think it's a common problem everyone has, and no one knows how to quite slice that up yet. Yeah, yeah, a nice tote board of technical debt would be good to see that every day when you walk in. All right, well, we're at time right now, so again, thank you everyone for coming. I'll hang around up here if you have any questions. Thank you. Oh, yeah, I want to listen in on this.


Hello and welcome to the Mantic podcast. This is a very special edition. It's the adepticon mega cast I'm using the name Rob. I might as well of course sadly since we could not be adepticon and Usually this is the chance where you get to ask all the questions. Usually Ronnie's got a bit of beer in him So the answers are a bit more loose And I'm joined by I'm gonna just rattle down the name. So we've got Rob Oh We've got Kyle Hi guys Got Martin Hello We've got Matt Gilbert. Hi guys. We've got Pat Good luck guys. And the one and only Ronnie Renton. We couldn't have a Q&A without you Ronnie So we asked you on Facebook for all your questions. So The plan is we're gonna go through them. We're gonna get all the details Someone's probably gonna ask about dead Zenford edition and and we'll have a good time. Are we ready? Let's go Already Roy Hood asking we've legally given for me Will we see the first Mantic halflings? Do we have a rough day when they will get their own army in Kings of War? I'm gonna send this towards you Matt Gilbert Yeah, well, obviously, you know, we've with the the League of Infamy gave us a chance to Explore some of the concepts that we we already had And to start taking the halflings in a direction that we wanted to go and explore We do have plans for for Kings of War longer term And we've got a timeline for the game generally and the the releases we want to bring out So, so yes, it's planned The fluff that you've probably read In the Uncharted Empires book kind of tease them them up for for leaving the the League of Raudia Not not necessarily completely, but certainly focusing back on the Shires themselves Well, we'll look at having their own full standing army with a Mantic spin on things Fantastic Jesse Cornwall also if I get any names completely butchered we're just gonna have to accept that because it's bound to happen at some point I'm gonna file this out You're a fronty we got that Jesse Cornwall Are you ever gonna make a model for the mammoth mr. Martin? I'm gonna send this you can tag people in if you need to by the way Looking at the size of some of the resin that's coming out of Ricky's office at the moment Then you're probably gonna say maybe at some point because they're just getting bigger and bigger really only so But I mean I can high-five Matt and on this one as well. See what he thinks Yeah, I mean I don't want to just do a Mammoth again would have to put some kind of Mantic spin on it to make it make it unique different and would want to make it Obviously then available to multiple armies to make efficient use of the kit Even if there were some some modeling options to do that, but yeah I mean it's definitely it's been on the list for a long long time. It's just one of the things of getting around to it Mantic when you when you are you took mammoth and an undead mammoth on almost every email and now you've been in charge of studio for two years I know one of the mammoth I gotta step in for Jesse here. He this guy's we've we're giving him way too much. Okay. First of all, he's got his own boots He's just getting way too much attention. We need to really you know the mammoth. Let's give it a pass There's one stride too many Yeah Punch I'm already after second question. I put running ladies. I don't think it would take this that one Right Rob, this was perfect the future of dread ball Dread ball ultimate expansion for the retail copy of second edition big question mark The future of turn balls obviously I will continue to be the best player in the UK. I think that's undisputed But I think we've got kind of lots of going on with the dread ball RC at the minute We're looking at doing kind of historical matches so looking at the matches maybe like the first Televised match between the Trontex and the Green Moon smackers So we're looking at kind of releasing those via a PDF So there's quite a lot going on actually in the background for that one and then dread ball ultimate expansion Yeah, so we've got a kind of a weird situation at the minute where everyone's got the mat for dread ball ultimate They haven't got the cards and they haven't got the tokens. They need this the subs bench So we're looking at kind of how we can do that and try and get that into people's hands Maybe this year, but yeah, stay tuned for that one. So yeah fingers crossed. We will get it sorted Rob, are you ever going to give Rob Taylor his rematch because I think I'm scared sorry you're breaking up mate This is a nice open-ended one so it's going towards Ronnie any plans to make more races playable in Deadzone slash Warpath Yeah, I mean We're quite excited about our own Deadzone world and he's doing very very well You know good recruitment game and the 3d terrain Carved out a little niche all around the world. So this summer we are I'm gonna say we've got more Fishtherians and we're dipping dipping back into there Did we end up doing Mr. Gilbert or Mr. Mr. Martin do we end up in doing anything new new would Cypher was that something different and later What else we got for Deadzone this summer just remember well, that's by the time this goes podcast all goes out Actually, we love reveals the Matzadan and the Asterian mech. So yeah, people will be very excited They'll be chomping That's not a Matzadan and Asterian mech That's not some weird mashup The Matzadan can't use that Asterian mech. Yes. So there's two things coming really cool some more red stuff, which is excellent It's more Asterian stuff very pretty and And I think then we would originally think you are going to make a slightly bigger version where you could play it But then that's that's grown and grown into something much bigger than that And so that was heading towards the end of the year But we all I can say I can definitely say is we are Spending a lot of time thinking and talking and being excited about our side by stuff It took a bit of a backseat last year with all of the Kings and War Focus And it had a big big update if you remember with the I can never remember the word Rob What's the word for the book last summer ex-gub location? Excalculation Excalculation That's a practical application Excalculation Excalculation, excalculation So it was one of those and the escalation was the big book last summer. It's been a big update So yeah, it still gets a focus As you know, we have mouth scenery fetages so there could be something exciting happening there So that just growing and generally our sci-fi is getting thought about and developed and Getting some some effort and thought longer term thought put into it Fantastic the next question is is going to be straight with you again Ronnie because it's just full of logistics From Felix Castro I've heard that with the recent unpleasantness Rumour has it that Mantic might start moving up the release date for resin models over plastic since Manufacturing from China took a bit of a hit which resins have been given a hard look for getting released sooner than later if any Okay, good question. So I'll just I'll talk you through what what the whole CV 19 meant to our supply chain as was until two weeks ago And then what what we think is going to happen going forward and then I will let someone far more qualified than myself talk you You But I'm what that means so we had to reincrease to halfway through being manufactured over in China It didn't make the cutoff before Chinese New Year and therefore it was the first project that the Chinese were going to pick up on Finished it finished the tooling, but they hadn't finished the manufacture So it's going to be a manufacturing and bagging and shipping process Throughout February on a boat and over with us Surely thereafter meaning that we would have kick starters out probably April To everybody And That got pushed back because of the CV situation even anti situation in China to leaving China in April And we did originally have the first wave of those releases coming out in late April or early May going to trade accounts So only the first wave which I think was going to be the zombie apocalypse stuff and that was going to tie in with our walking dead Releases so you could kind of build up walking dead gaming table as the same time as adding to your walking dead collection So good fun and kind of joined up thinking Obviously the terrain was not going to happen pushed back to To being shipped out of China in April so with us From lucky late May early Q'd more realistic That meant we had one of the releases that was supposed to come out May slot April May slot was now earliest is going to be June So China is back at work. They are making that they seem to be on schedule for that date So at the original move was we just got the walking dead into early April We had all of the Hellboy releases so we put those into April And then we looked at what we could do for May And then release the terrain creating G As it is we obviously are now nearly closed Which is maintaining our online store as recommended by the UK government So we're just doing that. So what we're now talking about is a month one release So the walking dead has just come out and all those early April we started shipping it to everybody to give them some of the bull draw in the downtime So all the walking dead releases are being shipped and if you've not got them go grab them now They're certainly online on the magic games dot com And they're going out there shipping and then we will launch when we start up again with the Hellboy expansions Because we have those in the warehouse in the May we will also then start releasing a selection of resins that were shuffling around And we've obviously not continuing to produce but when we get back that's what we'll put into production or some of them are ready to go So I'll let Matt talk through what are the month one and month two resins But there's lots of great things and we can just jump on those as soon as we're back and get them made and get them released Yeah so obviously as Ronnie said we've got those as the walking dead So you know that those will be going out but obviously a lot of people won't have been able to get them or ordered them in time So those will still be available almost like a new release in month one Well they'll be alongside the Hellboy busts which the guys are you know they're all moulded they've made a bunch of them But again that's obviously slowed down and will almost be like a fresh new release if you weren't able to pick it up before And we've got in things like Kings of War we've got the Soul Flayers in, the Well of Souls We've got the Dread Fiend which I just got some pictures back from Angale So if I send those over to Robin Matt I'm sure they'll put those up so people can see them And then you've already seen the Ogres I guess so they'll be next on the list as well So we've got a bunch of stuff coming up some of you would have seen some of you won't But you know we're gearing up for a sensible reintroduction to everyone back into work So that we've got releases that don't demand resin resource straight away But it gives them time to build get going again build back up and then start hitting in subsequent months Sensible? What's that all about? Sorry, sorry, yeah Let's have a look at the old list Brian Tucker so towards Kyle and Matt between the two of you We're expecting a Clash of Kings 2020 to balance Kings of War also make TK playable Something that I think is difficult right now is normally we're relying on a lot of event results to see how the balance of the game really is shaken out We haven't gotten a whole lot from this year it's kind of a strange time in that sense As far as I know the Clash of Kings is still planned right Matt? I've got a book called Clash of Kings 2021 in the schedule And so you know in my plans is still there for the normal time Definitely But as to exactly wherever they will follow exactly the same format as previous ones I don't know I need to have that over the next few weeks I'll start having that discussion with the RC See where we can take things or balance what we can But there might be some other content in there as well Fantastic Martin So this is Taylor Holt I've completely ruined that second name Even though there is a good selection of sci-fi terrain crates for Deadzone can we expect any new box sets? Terrain sprues terrain crate three to two two away I'm going to reread this terrain create three to terrain and beyond I think Ronnie already mentioned fetish for terrain so read into that what you will with regards to that But we do have a sci-fi crate much like the GM Star crate for the fantasy line We've got a sci-fi crate coming out pretty soon for just as one of the things we're just waiting for at the moment But that is along the same lines as it will be terrain it will be some monsters and baddies and some good guys in there as well And everything to get your sci-fi RPG game going Because we've seen such a good response to the sci-fi version we thought we'd give that one a go and see and see how we get on with it So from that point of view, yes, and that'll be a range of existing bits and bobs Plus we're also working on terrain crate as a whole around what we do with it And that includes the sci-fi lines as well as the fancy stuff Whether we rejig some of the boxes, maybe reintroduce some of the red brick which is always popular but not easy to get hold of So yeah, there's an awful lot going on with terrain crate and we just need some boats to arrive Thank you very much Pa, we have a question. How much are you missing a Depticon right now? Obviously I talked to you on the podcast about a Depticon so I think you're the thought on the mind Actually, I'm missing quite a bit actually because there's one time a year where we actually get to see a certain amount of people Just one time a year so it's definitely a miss I'm not missing all the work but I'm missing the hanging out The game and the drinks. I wish I was there Let's have a look Rob, if I didn't meet my microphone, are captain cards going to be made available again for Dreadbull? So yeah, captain cards. So that was something that was introduced in Dreadbull 2nd Edition And it's the idea that your captain has access to different abilities that they can level up I guess kind of So they've been unavailable for a while. We're actually looking at what we kind of do with the captain's cards Whether we do like a season pack and that all the captains have access to those So in the long term we're looking at what we do with the captain cards in the short term Yeah, I think we'll look at order in some more and getting them back in stock as well And Marta, I know you touched on sci-fi and fantasy Are there any more terrain pieces for the Walking Dead specifically? Yeah, well the Terrancrate 2 stuff One of the retail launches of that is all around the Walking Dead, so yes, definitely Fantastic Let's have a look Nick M. Williams, of course Asking about bulk buy options for Scarecrows, I guess that could extend to the Butchers as well Do we have a plan for that? Matt or Ronnie? So when he says bulk buy, do you mean you can already buy sprues individually? I think Rob on the website Well I think Nick is referring specifically to a ridiculous order he placed on the website Which was 120 Scarecrows And I did actually reply to this on Facebook and said we don't want to repeat anyone having to play against an army similar to Nick's Yeah, so we're going to make a double price which is more than 40, we're going to add a Nick Williams surcharge on I think that was a personal request from Steve Hildrew, wasn't it? Yeah, and I think he's already doing it to show off that he's glued that many Scarecrows together, so it's clearly self-aggrandisement by that most modest of Yorkshireman I thought he was from Lancashire Yeah, no he is actually, sorry, I still can't see right, how can I make a mistake? He's a second-class Lancashireman Matt, are the Aphidians coming as an army? I'm sure that even though Paul Jarvis is good at making friends, he'd like to have some company that's a little more lively What Jarvis isn't Aphidian? I don't believe Rob, I think when you wrote him, he's just obsessed with them Yeah, he was a wizard that became obsessed and got turned to the, well he's not necessarily the dark side, but he found an old book, became slightly obsessed with it and then started to dress like what he thought was an Aphidian would dress like as well But yeah, he's good at making friends, but I'll leave you to answer the trickier question about Aphidian armies So I know what the Aphidian army should look like and I've got some draft ideas for lists and models and things like that, but at the minute that's as far as they are So yes, there are tentative plans and I know a rough timeline for when that will happen, but it's certainly not in the short term Every time it's asked, it gets pushed back Yeah, really simple Now it's 20-25 Pascal Ruiz, are you planning to do a point adjustment and or profile adjustment? Some units have the same profile and have a different cost or have the same profile but extra special rule worth the same It has been thought that cheap cost units will lower the US to compensate zombie skirkers, I guess that sort of comes into Clash of Kings and you sort of touched on that and so if you haven't really had the chance to look at how units have played out even though they are similar Yeah, I mean it partly comes into things like Clash of Kings where we balance stuff but that has to be based on a good number of results from events and feedback But sometimes you can't directly compare things from two armies and just say oh well they've got the same profile therefore they must cost the same Because you've got to take into account all the other things that the army has and can do and the synergies within the army and something might have us be more or less efficient in one army than another So it's dangerous to directly compare things like that Okay, Ronnie, is there a plan for a more child-friendly dungeon saga? Yeah, something we've been working on actually Just waiting to see that there's a demand out there for it But the titles are going to have a dungeon saga origins option And it's a great way of just slightly simplifying the whole experience instead of very intricate dungeon tiles as you've done at the moment Which we use because it creates really defensive points, so in a player versus player scenario You know the undead has to outnumber the heroes in order to slow them down and win So we're kind of making more simple for straightforward gaming experience For easier to set up, easier to play And we're quite excited about it and we've got quite a bit of interest in what we were talking about prior to these dark days So yeah, watch this space, it could be really good fun, really great You know, dipping your toe into those slightly more advanced board games than traditional board games that have introduced into miniature board games Introduced to the dungeon corner, so something we've got high hopes for and we're quite excited about Okay, and the second part of that which I'll direct towards Rob For League of Infamy will there be further expansions not seen on the Kickstarter when it hits retail? So obviously in the Kickstarter we had the Siren's Wrath which was a tried-at-real one And then we had the No Half Measures amusingly titled the Halfling one So at the minute they're the only definite ones but we did have, we kind of knocked around some different ideas when we were planning League of Infamy Something to do with the Salamanders might be quite cool But yeah, at the minute we just got those two but kind of stay tuned And obviously League of Infamy is kind of the pledge manager's on the minute So if you want to get a late pledge head over to Game Found, nice plug there But yeah, if it does well once on retail then we can see what we do and possibly look down the line and release some extra ones as well Cool Nathan Askin, I'll send this towards you Matt Are there any plans for Silvian Kin models, Boss Grave, Wolf Faber, etc? Again it's a bit like the Fiddians, I know what they should look like So at some point I will get them some of those concepted I think we'll try not to do things piecemeal I'd probably combine that and some of their characters with something like a vanguard So we'd release specifically maybe Silvan Elves as a vanguard faction And then bring some of those characters and things in at that point and do it that way But as an entire army, no immediate plans to do an entire army So I think vanguard is a great way for us to introduce some of those new concepts Which we've seen with the stuff we've brought out so far, like with the river guard Dan Buster and things like that Which then made their way back into Kings of War I'll throw this one out into the open whoever takes it What's the release schedule for subsequent Hellboy waves? Say it again Matt What is the release schedule for subsequent Hellboy waves? So we've got Hellboy in Mexico Yeah, so at the moment the next wave that's coming up is going to be the busts Which is something we've been doing in the Kings of War, we had a bit of fun with those Lovely painted mini, big nice fluorescent pieces We've also got the BPRD Rob, BPRD case files Yeah that's right, so the BPRD is kind of like the Hellboy greatest hits Where you can kind of make your own, I was going to say mix tape I guess the hit kids won't know what that means A playlist of all the kind of greatest enemies and bosses these thoughts And you can kind of mix them all up and create your own missions So people have been having loads of fun with those Kind of on board game geek and things and some of the people have already got it So yeah that's next Mexico The corner It's already out Is that out? Got to show you what I know Hellboy Mexico is out, we're shipping out So am I getting confused? And then we've also got later in the year we'll have another show exclusive Well I think I have alluded to this before But I think it's a little hairy pig man People seem to love picking up They've all got gameplay pieces so they'll be happening Some of you may have had a little dabble with a card game as well that we've been working on Which is definitely not a drinking game, definitely not a drinking game But it is a pushy luck These are some dice and some cards, very very good fun We had a GenCon last year I've been taking you around some of the events We played a big game at Masters last week We had a gamer down at CanCon as well Or maybe he was still stuck in one Berman's drawer at that point He's been touring the world, he's been at some of the open days It's a great little game So that may well be coming direct out, we'll have some fun with that And we've done most of the journey from the main graphic novels But we've not quite finished it So who knows maybe, what's that final book called Rob, I always forget the name Storm and the Fury The Storm and the Fury, who knows So we'll have the appetite to do a big huge travel though Watch this space See, if I was at a Dempsey con I'd have drank a few beers and revealed more then There we are And if you need any more of the information The previous Hellboy podcast with Rob Has a bunch of the details just in case we did miss anything Go check that out again Adam, we're speaking to you from the future Can we see the new Maxidon and Strider? Of course you can Go watch the Dead Zone preview Rob, send this towards you Will there be a new Containment Protocols book for Dead Zone this summer? Maybe a next-size style No, so there won't be a Containment Protocols So escalation pretty much did everything we could possibly want to do with Dead Zone In terms of getting the rules Pits sorted out All the factions are now wonderfully balanced Thanks to the Dead Zone RC Apart from Murderbirds Which need to be Nerfabirds But yeah, it's kind of all that You've got the new big kind of scenarios And then you've got the balanced scenario as well All the abilities of the items So yeah, escalation is really kind of a great update So I think there won't be a Containment Protocols And kind of Ronnie alluded to this earlier on About kind of making the game slightly bigger Which is something we've If you've seen Dead Zone Excel at the open day So I guess watch this space for that on that But yeah, Next-A-Sci actually Is currently free from the website as well So if you want some solo play Against a load of Plague Zombies Then you can go and download that for free And get playing Just say a few little extra Plague Zombies Ricky asking What faction is next for Vanguard Please say Orcs Please say Orcs I ask Matt Well as people have seen The pictures of the Ogres coming out Ogres is the next release For Vanguard So they'll get new cards, updated rules Obviously now Vanguard's been out But they were always going to be one of the trickiest ones Because obviously mostly large models And large models are typically the exception In most other war bands So we've done a whole bunch of work With the Vanguard RC And the playtest group Offing them into shape So they'll be next alongside A couple of Kings of War releases Which will be some conversion bits Onto the plastics both for siege Breakers And some alternative parts For warriors So mix up those Just some new heads, arms, shields That sort of thing And much like the Dead Zone preview There's a Vanguard one on Sunday And so you can check out Should be all the previews For the fun stuff there Let me bring up back up the questions My wife has no interest in games But is a massive fallout fan Referring to the videos that Of course Ronnie has been featured in This week Which have been absolutely hilarious to edit And you've turned me down Considerably I'll have to draw a record of saying You're far funny on that finish You're confusing offensive and funny I've been tagged as like working in China I said I'll work under these conditions I demand my freedom of speech I just wanted a job after they were released But they kept me out of the place as well So that's good Cut him out of this as well then Matt Patrick Askin For The Walking Dead I'll send this towards you Ronnie Will there be any new terrain kits Like the farm, prison, et cetera For the new hilltop releases Hilltop Manor perhaps Is there a plan to still make the missing model On his knees for our Eenie Meenie Miney Mode display base And I'll tell you what Go to that one I can ask you the rest of the question It's a big one Okay I mean at the moment The MDF we haven't We've just got these resins out Minis Which is going to be more generic Opposed to apocalyptic modern day Set of plastics And then we were going to think about what was next Obviously I think we've revealed that the The way it's pressed It's only in sculpting and looking rather amazing So that's coming later on in the year Alongside a huge big omnibus book Which is going to both Get all of the keywords And all of the rules And all the FAQ and the writer All put into one place And all And then it'll have add-ons and expansions And new scenarios for Both call to arms And some new fantastic scenarios Probably set in the prison For the Eenie Meenie game So you can take your walking dead Minis from the football wave All the two and miles behind us And add them to the Add them to the tiles from his knee And we've got a few scenarios To the set pieces And then I think we will Terrain that and stuff That's been very, very popular One of the things we're walking down Amazing gaming tables Amazing paint jobs People have really been able to do Quite relatively small 20 by 20, well 20 by 40 You can get a lot of really You can spend a lot of time To make the quality fantastic With the terrain So we've been conscious that People have really gone to town on that And then yes probably almost Some more MBS stuff later on And the second part to that Any plans to make a more robust Campaign system that includes Creating and maintaining a supplement For example This can include board game Amountments or solo play Yeah both very good ideas If we have room in the omnibus We put it in there Probably more realistic We put it, you know Scenario with the book One a year And they probably end up in next year's book Alongside, you know We still have a problem about A hundred and something So there's still plenty of stories to go out So we will keep developing the All our war narrative So I think It's not to the gunnels I think in page count terms In terms of what we can get written And done in time It's a big campaign system It would be great fun And I think now we've got A lot of the minis out It would be absolutely appropriate So yeah Keep watching the space With very good suggestions Ronny have you got your phone Attached to a bit of string And swinging it round your head Have you got your phone Attached to a bit of string And swinging it round your head And swinging it round your head And swinging it round your head And swinging it round your head And swinging it round your head Raising you Pacing That's a win I've sung down now Erasmus this is Tuffa I'll stop with just a statement First But thank you very much. And secondly, an actual question, which I thought was an interesting one, probably whoever jumps in, in which order are I prioritising the three things, making new things, so new minis, filling out the incomplete model ranges and improving the old models? Matt? I guess Matt. I guess filling in the, filling in the model ranges is probably on a par with new stuff, I would guess. So whenever I put a release schedule together, I look at what new things we can introduce, what I think would be good in terms of our IP and where we want to take a particular army. But I'm always mindful of filling in gaps and going back to existing stuff. At the minute, I guess in terms of going back to older models, I think Vanguard has given us again the opportunity to do that on the fantasy side for Kings of War. So as you can see recently, we went back and looked at the aesthetic for things like epistle dwarfs.  That gave us a great opportunity just to update them and take them away from the hybrids that they were before based on the old, the kind of the good dwarf kits. And Vanguard gave us the opportunity elsewhere as well. So you know, when we did the forces of nature, we looked at the druid, which we looked at and said, actually, we think that was actually probably quite a weak model in the line. And we redid it, but we went back to the original concept art and resculpted it again. And I think that's a much more improved model. So we do do it. But of the three things, that's probably less of my focus. And it's new stuff and filling in gaps are probably on a par with each other. Okay, Rob, even if you don't know the answer to this question, it just feels right to head this one your way. For Dead Zone, it would be great to field an all goblin force, but we need some goblin troop choices for that. Anything that can be done? I totally agree. I think every single game needs more goblins. I think we should 100% do hard plastic dead zone goblins and everyone agrees. Even summon goblins in the background. Totally. Sorry, that's my kids have invaded on me. If they know anything about Dead Zone, I'm happy to have them on this show. And that was further with hashtag Dead Zones life, of course, because why wouldn't it be? And last but not least, for The Walking Dead, is there any thoughts on producing a fully co-op mode for that? Ronnie or Matt? Co-op, so this would be where you all played together against the zombies. I mean, it's quite a lot of the early scenarios. There is no PvP angle, and it is players versus zombies. There's quite a lot of those tonight, isn't there? But that is Negan anyway. Of course, all of these is Negan is nearly co-op. I think the scenarios in the Omnibus are there is no here's Negan angle to it. There's no angle. You are all playing together against killing the zombies in those ones. I'll check with Klaus Stowe, but if you remember the series in the sitting when they were taking over the prison, there was a bit of PvP action against the prisoners, but that was mostly covered in the safety behind bars expansion. This bit is actually set, it's using the tiles with far more board going, far more, you know, can't you? Can't you clean Dungeon Chorusk? But it's, you know, we've got one of the scenarios which is the famous scene where Tyree's goes to the gymnasium and they all leave him. And I think they've written that one where you've got to see how long you can survive and see if you can kill them all or Tyree's style. So, and there's a few more is a good kind of kill Dungeon Clearing Adventures. So, I think some of that stuff should be plenty, but it's something I'll dig is we've not covered something then feel free to PM me and explain what you're thinking about. Thank you. And on that one, has anyone got anything? Any more news coming out? Carl, you're on nothing. Can I just say like over this weekend of the, when is this coming out? When will this be out? When will people be listening to it? So, this will be out on Friday at the same podcast time. So, 12 o'clock GMT. Okay, GMT, lovely. Yes, well, yesterday's with no one. So, yesterday we had something featured and I'd actually come to remember what it was. What was the Thursday slot, Rob? Thursday was, it would have been dead zone. So, we've jumped and have a look around, there's videos, there's wonderful intros by a very central English chap, helping you get through the apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, no zombies. Friday is Vanguard, I want to say. No, Friday. So, Saturday's Kings of War, Sunday is Vanguard, Monday is Vanguard. Well, it was possibly a certain Mr. Crazy Bobby was meant to be appearing on Friday. So, we'll see about that. Right, yeah. I'm sorry about Crazy Bobby. So, every day this week, Thursday Friday Saturday, we've got tons and tons of great content. Earlier in the week, we told you how to multi-base. So, if you get it to Kings of War, you're thinking about it, the third edition, go watch that. It's great fun. You might have old armies from crappier, lesser known manufacturers that you want to turn into a fantastic game. Or, technically, you might have brought that to come to multi-basic, which is just a joy. Again, a wonderful Englishman. How to paint lots of free rules up on the website at the moment, particularly solo ones, getting started ones. So, do dive into the web, do dive into our Facebook pages. There is tons of things to keep you and your family, your housemates, house guests, amused during these times, both if you're by yourself or in a household. Great. I think that's all we have time for. We're going to let you all get back to fighting over toilet paper, defending your house from invaders, and going on your, if you're in the UK, one allotted piece of exercise. Not two, just the one. Thank you, obviously, to everyone that's been involved. As already said, there is more content coming out. The fun videos have been, they're originally on the blog, but now they're getting trickled out to you as well. So, keep an eye on those. I'm on the YouTube channel and the Facebook for all the future uploads and news regarding Mantik. And thank you, everyone.