IX Book

Henley and I use a bunch of tools to help us build our game.  We chose most of these tools based on our familiarity with them from other projects, my inclination to play and try new things (I’ll talk more about that in a later post entitled Rabbitholes), and because they are free or very inexpensive.

  Slack (free)

We use slack to communicate throughout the day. We originally intended to use it as a repository for all of our ideas, files, and chat. Slack advertises itself as a revolutionary way to work that will eliminate your dependence on email and, well, how you communicate with your teams.

We’ve found it most useful for the chat function, which allows us to stay in constant communication throughout the day on any device. We also share files through Slack. We only rarely email each other, and I think that it’s because we use Slack to communicate about all the things. At one point, we were emailing each other 10-15 times a day, often under 2-3 different email chains. Since there are only the two of us, and since we communicate about all of our projects there and we both have access to all the groups, we don’t see the revolutionary part of team communications across the company. At least, not yet...

Slack also integrates with a number of other services. We got it up-and-running with Dropbox, Google Docs, Pivotal Tracker, and GitHub quickly and easily. We later removed the connection to Dropbox because we no longer use it due to privacy concerns, but the option is there.

  Google Apps ($50/license/year)

We use Gmail, Drive, and Google Docs, primarily. We don’t really use Google Calendar.

While Slack is great for sharing files and getting some quick feedback, when actively working on files together (like this post) we use Google Docs.

We also use Drive to store most of the files that we share on Slack that we want to make sure that we have in case Slack ever goes away. It is still a startup, and we’ve both seen this happen a few times. We’ll also pull conversations with good ideas in them from Slack and put them into a Google Doc for later.

Pivotal Tracker ($18/month)

When it comes to coordinating the things we’re doing, Tracker lords over all the other tools.  It’s where we break down ideas into tasks and then apply priorities to them.  Henley has some peculiar requirements for how we write stories, both in terms of title structure and capitalization.  He doesn’t like the way capital letters (camel-casing in particular) looks on the titles.  So, he has us write stories in all lower case letters claiming it makes the screen more visually appealing.  He also wants all stories, within reason, written in the form of, “When a player does this they see that.”  It helps keep us focused on writing stories that describe a player’s experience.

I still capitalize the first sentence of everything.

GitHub ($7/month)

This is an obvious one for distributed development.  Henley writes all the code, but when there are other people working on the code base, git becomes invaluable -- and GitHub, as Henley says, is just the most obvious remote repository to use.

As a primer, git is a source control system. It versions every file in our game, and keeps track of changes made to those files by whom and when they were made. Except me. I don’t touch git. When more than one person is working on the same codebase, git’s real value shines through.  It has a bunch of features to allow people to work on the same codebase at once without stepping on each other’s toes.

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So, those are the tools that we’re using to build IX Book. So far, just a little over $400/year.