[casual_games] Production and project management Tools/Process

[Wade Tinney]

Hi all-

Over here at Large Animal, we've spent the past year cleaning up and
revamping our production processes and I'm curious to hear which
tools/processes other folks are using to produce casual games. 

I'll go first: we are currently using Fogbugz as both a project
management and bug tracking tool, mediaWiki for reference material (such
as the design plan and production schedule) and related discussion,
SVN/Tortoise for source control and Word/Excel for other sundry tasks.
For sharing assets with clients/publishers, we've developed our own
web-based tool called Yessum for posting files, collecting comments, and
getting approval.

For other communications, we're an Outlook shop. Although we don't have
an exchange server installed, so we're thinking of using something like
this to sync up our calendars: http://schedules.4team.biz/ Has anyone
used it?

We've tried using instant messenger in the past, but concluded that it
was mainly a productivity sink-hole and did not create a clear and
easily usable record of communication like email does. In general, it
only fits into the workflow of the person *initiating* the conversation,
and is a distraction for everyone else. Other opinions?

As for process, we have a quick (20 minute) morning meeting every day
that is akin to an Agile Development SCRUM. We generally use an
iterative design process, with very early prototypes and a lot of
pre-production in general. Someone recently introduced me to the idea of
"Feature Driven Development". Somehow I'd never heard of that, but after
reading a bit more, it sounds pretty much like the approach we take when
planning a project. 

That's the overview for us. I can go into more detail on the above if
anyone is interested, but what I want to know is what are other folks
doing? Did any of you come over from larger (traditional) game
developers and bring useful production techniques with you?

Thanks, 


Wade

Wade Tinney
partner, game designer
Large Animal Games
http://www.largeanimal.com
wade at largeanimal.com
212-989-4312