After hundreds of design document pages, I'm beginning to look at ways to organize a development team. I'm going to need a forum, and a chat room for meetings. As for the design document.. * Would have to be available online * Not be viewable to the public * Easy for me and selected members to make quick changes At first I thought about getting a Wiki. But now it seems like Google Docs is a simpler application. It's easy to upload the word documents I already have. Making changes seems pretty simple. So my questions are: * Have you ever used Google Docs in the development of a game or similar team project? * Do you think Google Docs would be good software to use to host a design document? * What other software applications do you think are useful when it comes to game development project management? Oh, and while I'm at it... * What is the easiest way to send, receive, and host large files online?

I just used Google Docs on my last game project. I found it very useful and easy to use with our game. We mostly used it for our backlog and buglist in the form of a spreadsheet. Everyone was able to make changes when needed and we could all make changes to the backlog when our sprints were over. I would say if you have a relatively small development team, Google is the way to go.

In the past, I have used Microsoft Project to organize a backlog and schedule. I found that this was not nearly as useful for the entire team to access, but was much better for scheduling the parts of the project.

I can only answer the third question. We needed something free, and Basecamp has been good, so far.

http://projectpath.com/

I'd suggest hosting your own instead of using basecamp. Try dotProject. The website is ugly, but the app is powerful as ****.

Edit: My suggestion is good only if you have the wiki/doc part covered elsewhere. Otherwise, just use basecamp as it has an assignment manager (less powerful than dotproj) and a watered down wiki.

Thanks for your help guys!

After watching the tutorial videos, I was pretty jazzed about using Basecamp. But it looks like it does actually cost something if you want to use webspace.

Actually, on second thought, I'm kind of a minimalist and I'd feel better about managing the entire project through a personal forum. But I'll still need at least 500 MB of webspace for the project.

I guess I could use my own webspace - is there an easy way I can allow people to upload into my webspace without giving them my password and junk?

Just be aware that Google and other online service providers may become a legal issue if you start storing company confidential or trade secret information on them.

For non-secret stuff, it is a great tool for sharing documents.

Our team is using PHPCollab, you will need your own server to host it on but it is amazingly simple and very organized.

Another option that you might want to look into is Microsoft's Sharepoint (I know, Microsoft). There are places that will host a sharepoint site for you. It will cost money, since they are hosting. Since we have to have Windows Server and use Office, a version of Sharepoint comes free with that.

We've been able to migrate pretty much all of our development tracking and hosting of documents to Sharepoint.

Like a lot of things it seems really vanilla when you start it up, but you can make it do a lot of different things if you hammer away at it.

Feargus Urquhart
CEO
Obsidian Entertainment, Inc.