I saw an interesting post over in the XNA Forums about team based development and I decided to share some of my experiences doing exactly that at Funavision. As I was writing my reply it dawned on me that this is probably a significant stumbling block for a lot of start-up Indie game developers. So I've decided to make this post and share my experience with a broader audience.

In this post I'll cover what we've done for distributed development over at Funavision as well as give some tips and tricks we've picked up that will help you out. The focus will be on Version Control and Project Management tools with a strong emphasis on free (as in no cost) and Open Source tools. It will also be heavily skewed towards XNA and Windows development (largely because if you're, say, a Linux developer then you likely know most of this stuff :-)

The post will be linked from the XNA Forums. Hopefully that will get it around enough people who need it that word of mouth can then take over and the people who could actually use this information will be able to find it.

I do want to say that what we did at Funavision is by no means the end-all, be-all solution for working in a distributed team-based way. There are many different ways to accomplish what we've done, and many different technologies and techniques that can be used (both open-source and proprietary). All I can say is that this is how we've done it, and it's worked very well for us. If you're someone lost and looking for some options, then you certainly could do a lot worse than what I'll be describing. However, if you already have something that is working well for you then I'm not suggesting you should ditch it and try the solutions described here. Each to their own.

Just wanted to make a quick post updating everyone on Duologue's status, as well as explain why I fail at this whole web-logging thing.

First of all, Duologue is still in peer review. If you're an XNA community member then please come on over and help us out. We seemed to be stalled at around 85%, and need something to push us over the limit :-)

Second of all, damn this XNA review process is opaque. Apparently what's holding us up is the fact that we released a bunch of alternate language descriptions of the game. That triggered some extended review being needed from non-English speakers, which is to be expected. What was un-expected (to me, at least) was that there's just not that many non-English reviewers out there and, apparently, some languages are spotty at best in terms of reviewers. Unfortunately, because all I have on the project page is a tiny progress meter I have no clue what's causing our hang-up and thus can't address it specifically. All I can do is beg and plead for more people to drop by and test, hoping that one or more of them will count toward whatever missing ingredient the murky soup that is the XNA review process is needing. Very frustrating.

It's been a long and hard process, but I'm pleased to announce that Duologue has just entered the Xbox LIVE Indie Games peer review process! If you are a part of the XNA Community, then you can join in this peer review at Duologue's game page.

As an aside, I've finally sat down and found some Indie games to buy on Xbox Marketplace. I've been so busy working on my stuff that I haven't been able to give some love to my Indie brothers. Anyway, I'm going to be making a post one of these days with some gems that I've found that everyone else needs to try. Stay tuned...

Yahoo, wahoo, yahee! Duologue is officially done! I've been spending time getting the site up (http://funavision.com/Duologue) which includes many new screenshots.

I also have a teaser trailer online for it. Check it out.

In case you haven't noticed, I've emerged from my web-site slumber of several months and begun making posts again. This should become more frequent in the coming weeks.

The reason I've been ignoring the world of the blorg and the twits is because I've been ass-deep in development of my first commercial game, Duologue. The total development time has been roughly 9 months from start to finish (although, that's me including previous starts and stops of other projects that led to Duologue :-) It's been a long and arduous task but I am very close to being done (in fact, I should have a final beta and possible RC drop sometime this weekend). There's only one minor thing to wrap up (the "Buy me! Buy me!" annoyance screen for the trial mode, which is mostly finished at this point but which may need some revision) and then it's feature-complete and basically done aside from any further bugs we may find in it.

This means you can expect to start hearing more and more about the game in the coming week(s). I'll get the game's page done soonish which and upload some screenshots and videos of the game in action. Then, at some point in the future which I can't predict, the game will go Gold on Xbox LIVE Indie Games. When that happens you can be damned sure I'll post, tweet, and post again about it.

Anyway, stay tuned...