Game Design Project Management
As an experiment, I wondered how it would work out to attempt to treat game design projects as formal-ish work projects. We know this is done by video game developers and we can guess it's done by tabletop game publishers for development, but I have no idea if any tabletop designers are doing something like this early in the process. All of the designers with which I have discussed process implied a much more free-wheeling (and organic?) system of notes and files.
To begin, I have set up a web-based project management system to track information related to my game design projects. After trying out demos of the various possibilities that met my criteria (PHP/MySQL) I have installed and setup dotProject. The two things that drew me to it in particular were that the business/financial data is easy to ignore (meaning it is not the focus) and that it can be made very project-centric (meaning nearly everything, including forums and uploaded files, can be attached directly to project records).
What I'm hoping to gain by using such a system is a convenient way to remind myself what I need to do next for each project (through task records), a clearer chronology of developments (though timestamps on everything), and a centralized repository for discussion (forums) and resources (file uploads/checkout) in collaborative projects.
To begin, I have set up a web-based project management system to track information related to my game design projects. After trying out demos of the various possibilities that met my criteria (PHP/MySQL) I have installed and setup dotProject. The two things that drew me to it in particular were that the business/financial data is easy to ignore (meaning it is not the focus) and that it can be made very project-centric (meaning nearly everything, including forums and uploaded files, can be attached directly to project records).
What I'm hoping to gain by using such a system is a convenient way to remind myself what I need to do next for each project (through task records), a clearer chronology of developments (though timestamps on everything), and a centralized repository for discussion (forums) and resources (file uploads/checkout) in collaborative projects.
Labels: game design