Hello,

This post is dedicated to those who want to develop their own game, and it’ll be about project management. Basically, I’ll explain how we organized Vitrum’s development.

The first thing we’ve done was to think about how the game would be, and for this, we’ve defined some characteristics, such as:

• first person view;
• powers exploring physics engine features;
• game based on challenges, which consists in discovering how to beat each stage;

After that, we’ve defined which would be the general tasks to be done, for instance:

• develop powers’ physics;
• model and animate the assets;
• model and animate the character;
• create the stages;
• configure the stages;
• create the interface;
• develop the interface logic;

Next, we have defined a few auxiliary tables, with more detailed tasks that fit in the general tasks. The important thing here is that the duration of these tasks should not exceed one week. So, if we take for instance, the tasks regarding modelling and animation, the auxiliary table would be something like this:

• model the character;
• texturize the character;
• create character’s idle animation;
• create character’s walking animation;
• model the wall;
• texturize the wall;

After that, we’ve been following an agile and flexible production process, which consists in delivering weekly tasks, and doing meetings every week, at the same day and hour, in order to discuss at least these topics:

• check the evolution of the previous week tasks;
• estimate tasks for each person, to be developed in the next week;
• discuss technical subjects regarding the game (which color should be the X power? how much should be the duration of the Y power? how could we improve the design of the Z asset?);
• discuss any other topic regarding the company/game;

We are following this production scheme since november 2011, and it’s working good! In 6 months we managed to go from nothing to have finished at least 70%  of Vitrum. The main hint here is to never let the team lose the pace, and this require every person involved! It’s always necessary that someone do the role of raising the morale and keeping things happening.

Feel free to ask questions, give suggestions and comment.

If you’re interested and wish to keep up with 9heads and Vitrum news, you can like our facebook page, and follow us on twitter at @9headsGames.

Hello again,

In this post I want to open our development box and show some of our tools and libraries. I really don’t want to start any unfruitful discussion about which is the best code editor, compiler or version control system, so I’ll just state what we use and I’ll move on…haters gonna hate!

So, as our code editor and compiler I use Visual C++ 2008 Express. I also use Premake to generate and link our modules. And regarding our version control system, we chose to go with Mercurial.

Now the interesting part, Vitrum is being made with our own game engine. This game engine was built using Ogre3D (an excellent  open-source graphics rendering engine) and Bullet Physics (a very fast and stable open-source physics library). And basically, the decision to build our own game engine using only free libraries allowed us to make a game from scratch without spending a single cent.

And aside of Ogre3D and Bullet, we also use the Boost Libraries, which are a pack of excellent C++ libraries. In my humble opinion, every C++ programmer should know Boost and try to keep up with its updates. And a good reason for that is that it’s made by the C++ grandmasters out there, so you’re getting the absolute best of the language for free.

I think that’s it for today, stay tuned for more posts about programming.