[casual_games] Production and project management Tools/Process

[Joe Pantuso]

WRT to source control and artist-friendly, we've been using SVN for about a
year now and it is great.  It is a huge improvement over CVS and the old
VSS.  Using Tortoise (a shell extension) is very user-friendly way to access
source control.  They can just right-click files right in explorer to commit
changes.

Perforce is an interesting solution, but I can't really recommend it unless
you have dedicated IT people and money to burn.  It has advantages for
geographically distributed teams in that you can work in a sort of 'cascade'
with local servers that synchronize with others.  The hardware, software and
time costs are high though.  Assuming all your team members have some sort
of broadband you will probably be fine with SVN.

I also highly recommend pairing SVN with a build system such at CCNet paired
with nAnt.  At a bare minimum you can use it to automate backups triggered
by check-ins, and email notifications to team members of new/updated files.
The best thing to be doing with it though is to automate your builds.  Build
automation is a spectacular tool for productivity and quality.

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Allan Simonsen
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 9:05 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Production and project management Tools/Process

Skype and MSN for day-to-day communication (we're
spread across 3 different countries, so it's mostly
online). Skype is really usefull for 2-3 way
conversations, but it's really disruptive. You can
still keep working while IM-ing. I agree it can be a
time-sink if not carefull, though.

We use Mantis (www.mantisbt.org) for bug- and task-
tracking.

At the moment using IonForge for source-code. Thinking
of swapping to SVN. Does anyone have any good
recommendations for a asset control solution that
artists don't hate?

We also use FTP a lot, to prove a history of builds.

Allan

> This is a good point. I'd love to hear about how
> people use their  
> project management tools as much as what they use.
> For us,  
> communication is going to be the key factor -
> anything that helps us  
> keep ideas flowing is going to be worth a lot to us.
> 


Allan Simonsen                    simonsen at rocketmail.com
ICQ# 16606984


		
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