If you ever want to get your game finished, then please read on

[Maph 0]

I'll get straight to the point. I think the biggest problem with actually getting a game finished among a community of random individuals is a lack of organization, and productivity.

 

I know of an online service that could very well mitigate this problem, if not solve it entirely, called Pivotal Tracker.

 

It's a powerful tool used by professional game companies to keep everyone aware of who's doing what, what needs to be done, and how things are coming along. The leader of the project basically creates a "story". This is basically a task that needs to be done like "Need mapping for town X". A value from 1-4 is then assigned to it to show how big of a task it is, 1 being smallest, 4 being largest. Each of the stories go into one of several "bins". These bins show how important these stories are, with the "Current" bin being the things that need doing most immediately.

 

Any member of the project can go in, and look at what currently needs doing, and select a story to "start" it. Once they've finished, they can select it as done, and the story goes from the "Current" bin, to the "Done" bin.

 

The real power of this tool comes in that it automatically determines how much work load to put in a single day based on the project's "velocity". This is basically how much work the members do in a week on average. That's what the 1-4 rating is for. So if a project has a velocity of 40, than that's basically a 40 point budget for the week. Pivotal tracker then takes stories from the "Backlog" (basically, the next step down from the "Current" bin), and puts them in the current bin each day, to try and match the average velocity.

 

The project leader has total control of course. If there are some things that you'd rather get done sooner, then you can simply swap it out for something that Pivotal put in the current bin by itself.

 

There are other bells and whistles, but the interface is very easy to use, and I think it's an essential tool to getting any sort of product finished, among those not being paid to do so.

 

I encourage anyone seriously considering trying to make a video game among a community to sign up, and check it out.

 

 

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/

[rgangsta 43]

This is actually a great idea. I've been looking for something like this.

Thanks a bunch. Now I can show people what I'm doing on my game.

[kellessdee 48]

This looks really cool and useful! It unfortunate it isn't free, however it is sometimes rare to find great things that you don't have to pay for. Either way this looks perfect for this kind of thing! Or any project really

[Broken Messiah 20]

Nice find :alright:

[kellessdee 48]

LOL i just realized it seems to actually be free...I just signed in with my google account

[Maph 0]

Yes, it is totally free.

[someoneyouknow 0]

Wow, this looks really cool. I think I'll need this. Thank you very much for the info, Maph :alright:

[Broken Messiah 20]

I was searching through the old project topics looking for al'alsugaia and ran into this. It looks helpful, and its not too old, so I decided to bump it up.

[madanchi 18]

More than a year old isn't too old?

 

But thanks for bump because I'm testing this out right now, I have a feeling it will help me out.

[dolarmak 23]

this is pretty interesting, with the community project that is happening here maybe they could use this to keep track of the stuff they need done.