Plan for Craig Fortune
by Craig Fortune · 02/16/2005 (7:04 am) · 1 comments
Dev Tools Series: 1. The Wonder of wikis
For any of those who read my .plans you'll be aware I like to do little "mini series" of them. For instance my recent traditional art set of .plans. I tend to use them to clear my own thoughts on subjects as well as tell stuff to people I think might be useful. Well suffice to say, I'm starting another little series :D
Development Tools
What a lovely and vague series title ey? Basically I want to discuss different tools or just general stuff I've found to be really helpful or just plain neat when it comes to game development. To start off with, Wwikis.
wikis
First off, what is a wiki? I find this a pretty good description (From Wikipedia.org)
The key things of note here are the words anyone and collaborative as these are what wiki is all about. Anyone can add documents/info, play around with the structure of things and just generally edit whatever they please.
So hows this useful?
Well to try a very basic implementation within your team why not stick your design document up on a wiki and let everyone have access to editing it? Wiki is all about a collection of living documents, which is pretty much what a design document ends up being.
Image and File Galleries are a nice feature of wikis too, allowing you to add files etc in an organised way rather then strewn across your ftp or website. Neat huh?
RSS Feeds
After the recent flurry of activity here with RSS feeds etc I've jumped onto the bandwagon of having an unnatural obsession with all things, er... bloggy. The wiki we use is TikiWiki (daft name, but I love it) and it can produce numerous RSS feeds for all the difefrent aspects of our wiki. I particularly like being able to monitor additions and edits as it saves me scouring through documents or having to be told theres an addition etc. A real time saver.
Pictures!
Well whats a .plan without an image? An imageless .plan one would assume... but Aha! this is not one :) Its a tad bit of a "heres an image for the sake of it" offering but what the hell.
Heres a quick lil' render of the machine gun, or "spittah" as it's known as by those tricksie Snachurz.
For any of those who read my .plans you'll be aware I like to do little "mini series" of them. For instance my recent traditional art set of .plans. I tend to use them to clear my own thoughts on subjects as well as tell stuff to people I think might be useful. Well suffice to say, I'm starting another little series :D
Development Tools
What a lovely and vague series title ey? Basically I want to discuss different tools or just general stuff I've found to be really helpful or just plain neat when it comes to game development. To start off with, Wwikis.
wikis
First off, what is a wiki? I find this a pretty good description (From Wikipedia.org)
Quote:A Wiki or wiki (pronounced "wicky", "weekee", or "veekee"; is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. "Wiki" also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website (see Wiki software).
The key things of note here are the words anyone and collaborative as these are what wiki is all about. Anyone can add documents/info, play around with the structure of things and just generally edit whatever they please.
So hows this useful?
Well to try a very basic implementation within your team why not stick your design document up on a wiki and let everyone have access to editing it? Wiki is all about a collection of living documents, which is pretty much what a design document ends up being.
Image and File Galleries are a nice feature of wikis too, allowing you to add files etc in an organised way rather then strewn across your ftp or website. Neat huh?
RSS Feeds
After the recent flurry of activity here with RSS feeds etc I've jumped onto the bandwagon of having an unnatural obsession with all things, er... bloggy. The wiki we use is TikiWiki (daft name, but I love it) and it can produce numerous RSS feeds for all the difefrent aspects of our wiki. I particularly like being able to monitor additions and edits as it saves me scouring through documents or having to be told theres an addition etc. A real time saver.
Pictures!
Well whats a .plan without an image? An imageless .plan one would assume... but Aha! this is not one :) Its a tad bit of a "heres an image for the sake of it" offering but what the hell.
Heres a quick lil' render of the machine gun, or "spittah" as it's known as by those tricksie Snachurz.
About the author
Recent Blogs
• Reflection, Part 4• Reflection, Part 3
• Reflection, Part 2
• Reflection, Part 1
• iPhones and Productivity
Torque Owner Ben "Djaggernaut" Chavigner
I use it for map or character properties, every data needed for an artist to make a map or level is written on a wiki page. Then the artist can simply post his progress on this page easily, add reference, concept, etc...
Btw, nice Spittah Craig! ;)