Monthly Archive for December, 2006

The PS3 becomes affordable… in 2012

Published
by
Robert Headley
on December 28, 2006
in Consoles
. 8 Comments

I was talking with someone on IRC (as I often do) and they mentioned about buying a PS3 when it reached $250 and it got me thinking.

Because I know I never bought a PS2, because the price/performance was never there for me, even $129 felt like a lot to pay for a six year old system, so I decided to do some math.

The Ps2 was released in America Oct 26th, 2000 at a price of $299.99
as of April 20, 2006 (roughly six years) the price was $129.99
Thats 57% give or take of a price reduction in six years.

Applying the same math, to the PS3, which is currently $499 for the low end model, comes to $215 rounded up… in six years.

The Xbox came out Nov 15th, 2001 at $299 and was $149 3 years later, thats a price decrease of almost 50% in half the time. A price decrease of $50 a year.
so, in 3 years, the Xbox 360 should be about $200 WITH the hard drive, and you can go buy yourself a classic 360 game with the extra $15.

(note: I had some major mistakes in my math, which I have tried to correct. Thanks to those who noticed it.)

Project administration

Published
by
Robert Headley
on December 6, 2006
in Freeware, Open Source and game design
. 1 Comment

When you are often working in a virtual office, project administration becomes incredibly important, but what is an independent game dev to do? Thankfully, there are several options that make this a bit easier.

Communication -

I find that IRC and IM serve the needs of my team well enough however I can see how others might need more than that. For those that do, there are services like Basecamp or freely available products like PHPCollab.

Once you have everyone communicating, it becomes time to share assets.
We use Subversion and Subversion client TortoiseSVN. Frankly, its the best thing to ever happen to the independant game developer. While it is true that it doesn’t have the features of an AlienBrain or PerForce, it handles code sharing and versioning, as well as artistic assets. Best of all its free AND easy to use.

If anyone else has any other project management tips, feel free to post them in my comments.