Communication amongst team members

[jasper.davis]

Me and A friend of mine are attempting to make a game on the Love engine. we came up with this plan while we got to see each other alot in class and whatnot. however now our work has stagnated by an enormous amount. What I know from reading around the internet, seeing things in development, and from presonal experience, is that one of the worst things that can happen to a project. However I refuse to allow this project to die out if I can help it. I know for a fact that the main problem we are having is simply the communication. with me in Germany and him in the States without a laptop, speaking about the game has become a fight uphill. I wanted an outside opinion on how to get around this obstacle because I am only a single mind and having at least a small collection of minds is better than one. please help me through this.

[Davidobot]

Set up a repo on GitHub or on BitBucket and have each of you contribute to that. Plus this also allows for version control and back-ups.

P.S. I think should be in the Support & Development forum.

[jasper.davis]

thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure if you can communicate very easily through Github though.

It pertains more to the project than to any issue we're having with the engine so I figured it better here than in the way in support.

[Davidobot]

thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure if you can communicate very easily through Github though.

It pertains more to the project than to any issue we're having with the engine so I figured it better here than in the way in support.

Then maybe try Skype or some other instant messaging platform or even just PM your bud on these forums.

[T-Bone]

Hat Cat was actually a lot like this for a long while. We both always had an ambition to finish it, but when we didn't meet in person development just stopped. If you can't meet, I'd say find some other activity to do together, just to get talking. Playing Minecraft while Skyping works for example, since you typically end up talking about other stuff than Minecraft after a while. Having a natural form of communication (that doesn't just feel like talking about "work") is important.

[shatterblast]

Hat Cat was actually a lot like this for a long while. We both always had an ambition to finish it, but when we didn't meet in person development just stopped. If you can't meet, I'd say find some other activity to do together, just to get talking. Playing Minecraft while Skyping works for example, since you typically end up talking about other stuff than Minecraft after a while. Having a natural form of communication (that doesn't just feel like talking about "work") is important.

+1 to this. Playing games together while on Skype helps a lot.

[SiENcE]

@jasper.davis:

We had the same problems. I can only tell you what tools we use to communicate and track our work.

- a Wiki to track ideas (Mediawiki but you could use github one if you have an opensource game)
- Gitlab https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ce/ (this is really a swiss army knife tool ...includes git, wiki, chat, issue tracker aso. )
- GoogleDocs (for writing design documents together at the same time...add notes)
- Skype for chats

Beside of this...we write each day ~10 emails ;-).

cheers

[jasper.davis]

@SiENcE These are great but he currently doesn't have a computer and by the time he does I'll be within biking distance -.-. I'll definitely use these systems though for later on. thanks.

[OttoRobba]

For conversations, I use Google Hangouts instead of Skype because it makes screensharing stupidly easy and tends to work well even when showcasing code. This way there is no need to copy paste something to show what is going on or where the person got stuck.

I also use things like Facebook and Whatsapp to share screenshots or quick tidbits of information.

For the design docs, I'm going in a different route. I'm basically creating a site (which makes it dead easy to share with others) using a static generator. My design docs are markdown files and I can sync it easily and, being static, I can store it on Github if I want to
I'm using Hexo but an easier one might be Dropplets.
You could even go with something as basic as blogspot - just be sure that it is easily accessible online so that you both can view it and modify it.

For the general development, my suggestions is something akin to the "Scrum" development process - basically, set up a white board to track your progress. This is what mine looks like:



I've found that I slack a lot less now that I've organized myself and I can also see just how gigantic the task ahead of me is. It also allows me to see at a glance what needs doing - this sprint was all about refactoring code, the next one will probably be all about refining the design document, fully implement it on Hexo and back to working on prototyping.

You can implement the same system on Trello - I'm sure there are others but this is one that I know and can recommend.

It is really easy to get stuck, just be sure to have goals set and short deadlines for them (mine are weekly).

[Cryogenical]

I second Trello.
I have different boards in my organizations for my projects (but I haven't touched much anything in a month or so.)

I'm still shit at Love2D.