¡Hi there!

How’s it going guys? Well, I know it’s been a long time since I wrote my last post, but I’ve had to cope with some issues here at Skara headquarter which have kept me quite busy.

Yeah, I’m the Game Designer, and that sounds pretty cool. At least, so it sounds for me. The whole day talking and arguing about such questions as “How fast will the characters run?”, “Where do we put this stone?” or “Which character will be the strongest one?”. But before we came to that, there were a few thing that had to be done, and I was the one who had to do it. As long as we’re trying to make of this blog something useful for all of you dealing with your first game development, I’ll try to refer how to do it, and what you will need in order to have everything ready to start developing. So, there we go, first of all… Project management!

When you’re trying to develop a big game, you soon come to realize that you need some sort of management software. There are a few alternatives that you may consider. Let me tell you about them:

Pivotal Tracker: A really good choice. And even better if you’re using scrum with your team. The bad point is that you must pay for it. And that’s not a very good idea for those of us who are starting in the industry, with lots of enthusiasm but not so much money.

Fulcrum: It’s a clone for Pivotal Tracker. I think it hasn’t been updated for a long time. But well, you´ll get almost everything you would find in Pivotal Tracker, and it’s free and opensource.

Trello: It is not opensource as Fulcrum, but at least, it is free. And it has very good point on its side that I would like to mention. There’s and App for both iOS and Android. For those working on a real company, with a physical place of its own, that may not seem very important. But for those working with their friend, from their houses, or with other real jobs, it will show up to be very useful to manage your issues while you’re traveling by train or in the tube, or even having some beers with your friends. (Yeah, we developers do that kind of things, too. Not always in our confortable caves surrounded by games and comics XDD) But well, let me warn you, on the other side, it doesn’t support bug tracking.

And finally, here we have it, the one we chose for our team:

Redmine:

It’s quite complete. It supports repository systems integration, versions management, and even holds a Wiki, so, you will not need to additionally do it yourself. It supports several projects management. Besides, it’s free and there are webs such as Bitnami (http://bitnami.com/stack/redmine) where you will find virtual machines fully prepared in order to have your Redmine system ready and running. That’s exactly what I did, and now we’ve got our Redmine working in order to manage our issues. Since then, we feel  more as a serious company. We never said we aren’t, did we? Hehehe

Have a nice day!