Idea to increase the collaboration between members

[Joao_Dalvi]

In my opinion two months is a good deadline.

I also think so. As @McFuzz and you pointed, one month would be too oftenly.

I’m not sure if I understood correctly this monthly challenges idea … It would be something like Ludum Dare? If so, I would say that monthly is way too often for most of us.

I would love to work in the collaborative development of a game. With a good idea and a good manager, certainly we could develop something like Minecraft, for example.

I`m sure that the community could come up with some good games!! I don’t know what the Ludum Dare is, but regarding the challenge that we are discussing here, the idea is still under development, but it would be something similar to what they have under the Blender course community, but something that people from different courses will join together to create, could be a time-based challenge that will have a broad theme with logical random teams from different courses where people share their games once the deadline arrives and then it starts all over again with different themes and teams. Something very casual that would allow us to get to know each other and to start collaborating.

[Rob]

I don’t know a good GitHub course in order to recommend

Hi Johnny, this was the one I took, Git started with GitHub. I don’t have other Git courses I have taken to compare it to, but I found the information easy to understand, and I felt I was given enough of it to give me the confidence to start using Git. When I asked a question to the instructor via Udemy I got a response very quickly - indeed it was the instructor, Jason, who mentioned BitBucket to me, another online Git repository, but without the need of making your repositories public (at least for individual usage, would need to check for teams etc).

but I’m afraid that if we use this kind of approach the groups won’t vary and we won’t get to know and to work with as many people as we would if the teams shuffled every two months or three, which increases our networking and allow us to do cross-engine challenges

In my previous roll as tech manager I had a group of 8 devs, they were split in to two squads of 4. This was a step forward from how the team worked years before, individually, as we just had many silos of information rather than information being spread across the team. I introduced a trigger point system, it was simply a date which went on the shared calendars, at this point or as close to it as practical, one team member from each squad moved to the other squad. This enabled my team to ensure that they got to work with everyone. If there were people you didn’t always get on with it was a way to move away from them for a period of time, if there were people you were close to it ensured that you did have to work with other people to - above all it ensure that more people started to become familiar with the variety of projects that, as a team, we had created. The trigger points in our case were at quarterly intervals which could be adapted obviously in this scenario.

Also in my opinion is easier to organize a structure that has a lifespan, which makes easier to new members to hop in

You could still achieve this. If you have broken down the work into features, then the life span of the project should simply be feature x development duration (whether it’s fortnightly, monthly, two monthly) - it would still give an overview of the total amount of time. It also gives you the flexibility to adjust the development duration over time if, say 1 month is too long / too short etc.

It would be awesome to see a Text101 game with graphics and scenes made by the blender students =D some sort of point and click story games!

That would indeed be very cool to see

Anyway, all of the above are only suggestions, not trying to say how to do it, just offering some thoughts on what may work. It will invariably be an experience in both overseeing/managing a collab project with remote participants of varying experience(s) and working in one, something which over time I’m sure will raise a significant number of things that worked well and things that could be improved.

[wowsuchnamaste]

The Unreal course touches on Git quite a bit, actually - so guys doing that course would (should) be able to help out the rest of their team members. I’m surpised this isn’t covered by the Unity course, but I haven’t started that course myself yet.

For anyone interested in learning more about verion control, specifically Git, Atlassian have made a pretty nice and thorough tutorial on it, which can be found here. And kudos to @rob for linking the Udemy course!

The idea about iterating on course sections to improve upon them, and perhaps eventually turn them into fullblown games, is in my opinion a very good idea. Depending on the scope of the project, I would recommend team sizes of 5 or 7, and I would very much encourage everyone to read up on Agile and Scrum, as it makes it much, much easier to divide the work that needs to be done between everyone involved, while respecting available time and level of competence. For anyone interested, I recommend the book “Power of Scrum” by Sutherland et. al, as an easy and quick read which provides a fairly good overview of the core ideas behind Scrum (and the kindle edition is currently fairly cheap).

[Michael_Whitaker]

ay, all of the above are only suggestions, not trying to say how to do it, just offering some thoughts on what may work. It will invariably be an experience in both overseeing/managing a collab project with remote participants of varying experience(s) and working in one, something which over time I’m sure will raise a

Yeah, I think that a point and click short adventure is a good idea … these are all skills that new students pick up early in the course. Both for unity as well as blender.

[coradesque]

I don’t know what the Ludum Dare is,

@Joao_Dalvi Ludum dare is accelerated game development event . During a Ludum Dare, developers spend a weekend (yes, 48 hours) creating games based on a theme voted by the community. You can check the games in the Ludum dare website, there are a very good ones.

[Rob]

I would very much encourage everyone to read up on Agile and Scrum, as it makes it much, much easier to divide the work that needs to be done between everyone involved, while respecting available time and level of competence.

It just so happens that I have received (just now, literally!) an email from Axosoft today who have a blog entry relating to scrum, maybe an interesting read for those interested. It’s free, no need to register or anything to view it.

10 Things About Scrum That Will Change Your World

It is primarily aimed at businesses/organisations, but if you consider your collab team as the organisation you’ll be good - hope it’s of use.

Thanks for the link to Atlassian’s Git tutorial @wowsuchnamaste - that’s very useful, so much so I have added it to the Free and Cheap Indie Gamedev Resources wiki

The course mentioned above does also provide a couple of hand outs under the resources tab, I was going to share them previously but it didn’t seem appropriate without people actually going through the course themselves, but they’re quite useful also from a process perspective with Git.

[Joao_Dalvi]

Hi Johnny, this was the one I took, Git started with GitHub. I don’t have other Git courses I have taken to compare it to, but I found the information easy to understand, and I felt I was given enough of it to give me the confidence to start using Git. When I asked a question to the instructor via Udemy I got a response very quickly - indeed it was the instructor, Jason, who mentioned BitBucket to me, another online Git repository, but without the need of making your repositories public (at least for individual usage, would need to check for teams etc).

I’ve done this course too, he seems to be a good teacher, but since I don’t wanted to deal with command lines for now, I have not used GitHub so far, Do you recommend any GUI?
I`ve heard about BitBucket too, but honestly, I’ve zero experience with svn and I need to study it further, I was waiting until I get into the classes that talks about it in Ben’s unity course.

In my previous roll as tech manager I had a group of 8 devs, they were split in to two squads of 4. This was a step forward from how the team worked years before, individually, as we just had many silos of information rather than information being spread across the team. I introduced a trigger point system, it was simply a date which went on the shared calendars, at this point or as close to it as practical, one team member from each squad moved to the other squad. This enabled my team to ensure that they got to work with everyone. If there were people you didn’t always get on with it was a way to move away from them for a period of time, if there were people you were close to it ensured that you did have to work with other people to - above all it ensure that more people started to become familiar with the variety of projects that, as a team, we had created. The trigger points in our case were at quarterly intervals which could be adapted obviously in this scenario.

Joao_Dalvi:
Also in my opinion is easier to organize a structure that has a lifespan, which makes easier to new members to hop in

You could still achieve this. If you have broken down the work into features, then the life span of the project should simply be feature x development duration (whether it’s fortnightly, monthly, two monthly) - it would still give an overview of the total amount of time. It also gives you the flexibility to adjust the development duration over time if, say 1 month is too long / too short etc.

This would work too. We will need someone with experience (@Rob I vote on you ) to organize this structure in order for this to work properly.

Anyway, all of the above are only suggestions, not trying to say how to do it, just offering some thoughts on what may work. It will invariably be an experience in both overseeing/managing a collab project with remote participants of varying experience(s) and working in one, something which over time I’m sure will raise a significant number of things that worked well and things that could be improved.

Ideas and suggestions are very important, and this idea is very good! It is indeed a viable way of doing it and increasing the collab around here.

The Unreal course touches on Git quite a bit, actually - so guys doing that course would (should) be able to help out the rest of their team members. I’m surpised this isn’t covered by the Unity course, but I haven’t started that course myself yet.

For anyone interested in learning more about verion control, specifically Git, Atlassian have made a pretty nice and thorough tutorial on it, which can be found here. And kudos to @rob for linking the Udemy course!

The idea about iterating on course sections to improve upon them, and perhaps eventually turn them into fullblown games, is in my opinion a very good idea. Depending on the scope of the project, I would recommend team sizes of 5 or 7, and I would very much encourage everyone to read up on Agile and Scrum, as it makes it much, much easier to divide the work that needs to be done between everyone involved, while respecting available time and level of competence. For anyone interested, I recommend the book “Power of Scrum” by Sutherland et. al, as an easy and quick read which provides a fairly good overview of the core ideas behind Scrum (and the kindle edition is currently fairly cheap).

Thanks for sharing this tutorial about git, the unity course does teaches about git, but only further on the course (class 265).
I’ll also take a look into Agile and Scrum, I`ve been using Trello for this kind of management, I’ve heard good things about slack too, seems that Agile and Scrum can improve a lot the productivity.

@Joao_Dalvi Ludum dare is accelerated game development event . During a Ludum Dare, developers spend a weekend (yes, 48 hours) creating games based on a theme voted by the community. You can check the games in the Ludum dare website, there are a very good ones.

It is a Game Jam, right? Very cool event, I was looking for something like it, I’ve just added it to my favorites here, thank you very much for sharing it! And they have many games published on steam too, that is so nice!!

So many good resources added here Thank you guys, this forum is awesome.
@coradesque @wowsuchnamaste @Rob

[wowsuchnamaste]

Thanks for that link, @Rob - great read!

As to the tools you mention, @Joao_Dalvi, I enjoy using Slack both in a professional capacity and in one of my sparetime projects. I use it mostly for chat, which is where it is very good imho - and I enjoy the fact that services such as github integrate with it, so commits and pull requests can be automatically entered into a chat channel. No need to check a range of services to see if something happened just for the sake of it - saves time and makes things easier. Also promotes a level of transparency in a team, which is great.

I know Trello is popular, and for the life of me I don’t get it. I’ve used it a little bit (and I’m probably a major cause for why the team stopped using it in the end, to be honest); I found it unnecessarily hard to get an overview of the stuff that is important to me, and very confusing that multiple people could be assigned to the same “card” and thus acting as responsible for whichever task was described in this card, moving it up and down the pipeline. The layout also promoted discussions inside Trello, but sort of concealed what was going on unless you open each card and have a look. I have previously used Asana as well, which I prefer over Trello, although they are quite similar.

I am much more a fan of issues on GitHub, which can be extended quite a bit by using the ZenHub extension (for free in public repos or up to 5 users in a private one). In my professional work I use Jira, which is a paid service (albeit not terribly expensive for a cloud-hosted solution), which is very powerful and can be customized to your heart’s content - but I would advise against it for a team in the scope of what is discussed here, because it requires quite a bit of effort to set up and maintain. For longer term efforts though, definitely worth looking into.

And yes, this forum is indeed awesome - I really appreciate being able to take part in a thriving community where knowledge sharing seems to be more the rule than the exception. Thanks, guys!

[Eric_Phillips]

I LOVE the idea of a place for people to reach out for collaboration. We are in the electronic age after all and with tools like Bitbucket, dropbox, google docs, etc… there are a ton of team tools out there! A team could form and never physically meet, but work on a project together.

The problem you run into with online collaboration is effort. A LOT of people have ideas, want to see those ideas come alive no matter what… and that’s ok. However, you can not collaborate on a project if you wanna just be the idea person and not do any of the coding or actual game art. I have run into this several times now. Someone wants me to code something, but all they want to do is give the story and no other work. I used this example during one such situation: That is like me doing the cover art for a book, but wanting you to do all the writing. At what point is the book yours and no longer mine?

I hope a collaboration area for everyone is just for that… not just for people wanting free work for something they want and not meeting others halfway to get it done.

[wowsuchnamaste]

I believe Scrum for these kinds of teams can help remedy exactly that. By having smaller tasks, and being completely transparent about what gets done, I think there will be less of a risk of having these kinds of things happen. Of course, there are no guarantees… but in case you come across a “coverart designer”, you can probably spot it earlier and gracefully exit the project before you’ve written the entire book

[Rob]

Do you recommend any GUI?

I haven’t used many to be fair. I have currently installed GitGui (think that may have come with the standard Git install as its in a folder group with GitBash and GitCMD - honestly can’t remember as I’ve not used them).

What I did install and use was Git Kraken, mainly because a) it’s free b) it was a new product and in development c) it’s made by Axosoft, who’s other product “Axosoft” I had used for Scrum.

It looks quite fancy and has documentation and if you get on their mailing list you’ll receive ample updates. I think for teams and profit though you should buy the pro version - but for individual usage the free version has been great so far - as I mentioned above though, I tend to only do the basic stuff with it at the moment.[quote=“Joao_Dalvi, post:47, topic:6734”]
We will need someone with experience (@Rob I vote on you ) to organize this structure in order for this to work properly.
[/quote]

lol - I would be happy to help with some examples of breaking higher level features down into smaller features and subsequently tasks.

Trello is a handy (and free!) tool which will give you the basic functionality for managing features/tasks (and potentially defects/bugs) - as you can just create more lists. Defining sprints may get a little more challenging depending on whether you want to be able to review what has been done before and have many lists in Trello or not, but as with everything in life, there are always different ways

Just give me a yell as and when if interested, although I’m sure there are other people here with experience also, so please do share the votes/love

[Rob]

I hope a collaboration area for everyone is just for that… not just for people wanting free work for something they want and not meeting others halfway to get it done.

You make some very good points @Eric_Phillips, I personally would be significantly more interested in seeing any collaboration efforts being made in the interests of a) learning and b) gaining experience - anything other than that, if positive in nature, is a bonus.

I don’t think anyone should just be the “ideas guy/gal”… everyone should feel as if they are a valued and contributing part to any collaborative effort.

[Rob]

I know Trello is popular, and for the life of me I don’t get it. I’ve used it a little bit (and I’m probably a major cause for why the team stopped using it in the end, to be honest); I found it unnecessarily hard to get an overview of the stuff that is important to me, and very confusing that multiple people could be assigned to the same “card” and thus acting as responsible for whichever task was described in this card, moving it up and down the pipeline. The layout also promoted discussions inside Trello, but sort of concealed what was going on unless you open each card and have a look.

Those are some good points @wowsuchnamaste, I’ve only used it for personal projects myself to date, so I’ve not really had to worry about the assignment of things. I have found some limitations with it even on a personal level but as I’d not tried other tools (other than Axosoft which isn’t free) I tried to bend it to my needs to a degree. I may well come to the same conclusions if multiple people were involved, but I guess it depends on the complexities too, as mentioned in my other post, creating more than one sprint is going to get messy pretty fast, unless you start archiving, and then you lose the easy visibility.

[Joao_Dalvi]

@Rob, @Eric_Phillips,

And I think that this forum is a great place to find the good type of collaboration. Where everyone that subscribes will collaborate!

[wowsuchnamaste]

[…] I’d not tried other tools (other than Axosoft which isn’t free)

I guess that’s part of the reason why I dismissed it fairly quickly myself - as I’m used to Atlassian’s Jira (also non-free), the limitations of Trello became asphyxiating. The disappointing factor is that even upgrading to a paid account didn’t seem to be a solution (based on looking into the feature descriptions only, I didn’t try it).

Thanks for the tip on GitKraken, by the way. I’ve been using GitHub Desktop and SourceTree (both free). SourceTree has more features than GitHub, but still leaves my repositories in a mess from time to time, which can only be sorted by using the CLI. I’ll have a look at GitKraken these upcoming days, I was sold on the dark themed UI

[wowsuchnamaste]

Based on the discussion with @Rob and @Joao_Dalvi before the weekend, I got in touch with @ben regarding setting up a Slack team for the community. Not so long story short; it turns out there have been several requests for it, Ben is happy about the initiative, and asked me to help him out with it to see how the response is and if it is worthwhile to keep it running.

Hopefully, this will be a low threshold way to get in touch with others that may want to collaborate on something, share ideas, ask about stuff that’s not necessarily related to the different courses, or just to have a chat with someone else who is also into game development, programming, or 3D design. It will not be a support platform for the different courses, however - keep the questions about lessons etc here on the forums, where others can also benefit from the discussion

Due to the nature of Slack, you’ll need an invitation to be able to join up. If you want to join, send me your email as a private message here on the forums, and I’ll set you up with an invitation.

[Joao_Dalvi]

This is very good, @wowsuchnamaste have just added me to the slack team, we are waiting for more members so we can organize it and make it happen