Collaborative development?

atxryan

Have you worked with another developer on your games? What were the best practices for sharing your GameSalad project between developers and splitting up tasks?

Braydon_SFX

I've tried to work with another coder but it didn't work too well. Having to send your project to your partner every time you change something got pretty old. I'm interested to hear others thoughts on this as it didn't work out for me.

SlickZero

Yes, I have. And using something like dropbox makes it painless to share development assets, and project files.

It's best to know who is doing exactly what before you get anything started, in my opinion. And again, dropbox makes it quick and easy to show progress, and get everyone involved to agree on the quality of the asset and wether or not if it should be altered. No emailing, or Skype file transfers. Everyone gets synced automatically when a file is added to the dropbox folder. Makes things so much easier.

atxryan

Yup, I figure something like Dropbox or SkyDrive is a must. If you're setup for it, you could even use Github, etc. to version your game in case you need to roll back to a previous version.

However, this still means you're working synchronously on the game because you're both essentially editing the same file without an easy way to merge in changes. @Slicknet, did you have a gameplan for how to edit the same file? Who would be in control of with game logic, etc.?

SUMinteractive

We use Dropbox and do 1 programmer and 1 or 2 artists. This way no one steps on anyones work. Just be on IM and do calls daily. Works great for us.

SlickZero

Our method was 1 person doing the logic, and another doing graphics and sound. This way the only person making the changes to the game project is the scripter, and anyone else involved can review what progress was done, with the understanding that they are not to make changes and save over the project file.

Two people working on the same file can leave it open to corruption, and if there is no backup, that's quite a problem. We try to minimize that by having just 1 person dealing with the logic and the game project file. On a team with more than one person working on game logic, some way of merging progress would be nice, other than everyone working on the same file. There is a 3rd party program for merging GameSalad projects that could be utilized in this scenario, but it would have to be one person in charge of keeping all the progress merged together.

Everything I am in charge of doing, I keep an exact copy of what is in the dropbox folder on my local machine, which is also backed up on a hourly basis. Just in case of a corrupt file or some un-foreseen accident resulting in loss of data.

OskarDeveloper

I am currently working on a game called FlipRunner together with @DeadlySeriousMedia , we use email and the gamesalad message feature. It works great for us, though I definitely think sharing a dropbox would be much more "effective" than send email attachments ...

DeadlySeriousMedia

@OskarDeveloper yes....yes it would

tenrdrmer

Ive done several Collaborations. @Slickzero being the current one and every time dropbox has been the best.

One project I worked on used a service called www.basecamp.com For that one it worked well simply because I was more of a contractor instead of it being a collaboration. on there the guy running the project would post a project file with a list of tasks. Then when I was done I would upload my work and wait for my next assignment. I would not like it for a project I was running but it worked in that situation.

The most important part of any collaboration is communication. You never want to even have the same file open out of dropbox. it can easily cause a corrupted file. If your gonna be in a file that is not normally your area you need to make sure no one else is in there. and the best thing is to always copy it out of dropbox before opening it.

LumpApps

Thanks for the info. I have thought if collaboration many times because I have so many ideas and half baked projects.