My good friend Rick Stirling has put up another in his series of “Game Art for Beginners”. This episode in the harrowing journey from polygonal wimp to digital maven is called “Introduction to Alien Brain”. For those that are not in the know, AlienBrain is a revision control system or “Asset” control system in this case, since it is aimed primarily at artists.
There are free alternatives like Subversion, which while free are not designed specifically for art assets but do work pretty darn well for versioning and reverts and the various things you do with such a system.
So go ahead and click on the article and enlighten yourself to toys the big boys use.
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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.