The ZGXP (Part 8 - Cans and Strings)

Last week I got into a little more detail on what I do at ZeeGee games during my production internship. I thought I might get into some of the "how" this week. Specifically, I'd like to talk about the communication and collaboration tools we're using.

First up on the hit parade is Google. Google's got a lot of tools. Like, a whole friggin' lot. We're using GMail for e-mail; Google Calendar for meeting schedules; Google Docs for our sprint tracking sheets, time-tracking sheets, and some design docs; and Google Sites for archived projects and training material. Recently we've started trying out Google Wave. It's only really caught on for keeping meeting minutes for our weekly production meetings, but I'm currently trying it out for the design of a new game project. I thought it might be a good idea since the design is still in a very collaborative stage and Google Wave makes it easy to add text or images to discussions.

ZeeGee began using Unfuddle just a little after I started. It's been an important part of our production pipeline and asset management. We've been using it to track bugs using the tickets and are moving towards using the ticket system to track employee hours on all their tasks. Unfuddle is also our SVN repository for all our active projects. SVN repositories are basically places to keep all the files you're working with. They also track any changes made to the files as separate versions, so that's handy. We've been using Tortoise SVN on our PCs and SC Plugin on our Macs to connect to the SVN repositories. Like most SVN repositories, Unfuddle took some tweaking to get set up, but it's been real useful once we ironed out all the SVN kinks and came up with a strategy for utilizing the ticketing system.

Skype is the tool of choice for communication. We use Skype for client meetings and video conferencing. It's also handy for swapping files, code snippets, and web links quickly within the office. We also tend to make plans for lunch and other non-work related things on Skype, mainly because we don't like communicating with each other in person since we're a bunch of nerds. Game articles, pictures of bionic cats, and the occasional Rickroll can also show up in the company chat in Skype.

It seems to me that the choice of communication and collaboration tools on a project really come down to a matter of preference. The Google suite, Unfuddle, and Skype work really well for us at ZeeGee. They're easy to set up, relatively inexpensive, and they do everything we need them to do. Really, what else can you ask for in a production tool?