04.20.08
Distributed Development
There are certain advantages to having your team distributed across 4 continents. One is that somebody will almost always be working on your project at any given time of day. When you’re sleeping in America, your guy in Europe is up working, and there’s enough of an overlap to meet up in before he goes to bed and catch up.
There are a lot more disadvantages though, sadly. The chief problem is communication, of course, which is a substantial but partially surmountable problem: Wikis, forums, instant messengers, voice chat, and video conferences all exist to help alleviate communication issues, though nothing will ever beat actual physical presence.
The biggest problem for me right now is motivation. I’ve previously whined about how annoying it is to be unable to celebrate properly after major milestones, but it extends beyond that. When you’ve spent years working on a project, you really want to sit down and enjoy it together when it’s nearing completion. You want to meet up and play through the game. You want to share the experience. But all this is impossible in a singleplayer game if you have no way to gather everybody in one place. I want our next project will be multiplayer. Maybe it’ll have a co-op mode. Maybe it’ll be competitive. Just as long as it allows us to all play the game together even though we’re in different parts of the world.
Until then, we’ll make do with voice chat with our testers while they play the game. That can also make for some surprisingly efficient bug fixing.
EER said,
April 22, 2008 at 15:00
Just announce a release party and I’ll make sure to be there, in person, coming to get my TNM copy from your cats. They steal EVERYTHING!
Matt said,
April 23, 2008 at 16:15
I’m surprised there aren’t more people who want live streaming gameplay! There are a couple ways of capturing the desktop or windows (as a webcam, no less!), but all the sites for live streaming video via a webcam cap the FPS to 23 or so…that’s hardly optimal for anything other than maybe a puzzle game! I will admit that I’ve seen people stream video live at such a low framerate, so solutions HAVE been found. I’ll just have to do a bit more sleuthing and maybe I’ll find the answer I’m looking for.
For now, I guess we’ll just have to keep using TeamSpeak…I’ll try to make it sound like a radio drama next time!
Jonas said,
April 23, 2008 at 16:21
Hahah yeah, getting video would be awesome. I definitely wouldn’t mind a framerate of 20 FPS, btw, so if you find a solution that caps the framerate there, that’d be fine to me!