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About Nihilistic
- Independent Video Game Software Development
- Develop Games for the Sony PlayStation 3 & Xbox 360
- Spend a year and a half to two years working on bringing each new game to market
- Manage a unique mixture of:
- Graphic Artists
- Programmers
- Texture Artists
- Modelers
- Sound Designers
The Challenge: Needed Way to Track and Manage Game Software Development
- It was horrendously difficult to track the flow of communication & decisions once they were made
- A huge number of complicated design documents started with designers, then were handed off to programmers & artists to implement
- People had a hard time finding & searching for documents, then knowing which version was the most up-to-date
- Trying to send large files back and forth via e-mail or trying to communicate where things were at on a shared drive was grueling
- Being in such an extremely competitive market space time spent redoing work or rethinking decisions could be a killer
The Solution: Central Desktop's Centralized Document and Project Management Solution
- Putting all the design documents in a single centralized place, online at Central Desktop, made them easy to find
- It's searchable
- Version control ensures that everyone has the latest, most up-to-date version of the files
- File changes can be tracked by individual designer, artist, or programmer
- Entire art galleries can be uploaded
- The gallery visual tools combined with the database creation wizard makes it easy to view & access a database of rich images
- Providing a workspace where everyone can see what is going on is an essential tool for managing the large magnitude of changes Nihilistic makes daily
- Decisions are tracked as they are made
- Everyone has access to the latest, most up-to-date information via Intranets
- Constant updates are received on projects as tasks are completed
- The integrated task management & task tracking system makes it easy to get tasks done & hand things off to the appropriate people
- The entire development cycle for producing games has been set-up as a basic template, where the process is tweaked to make things easier & easier for each new game developed
- The public & private folder system for internal vs external users has been a great, easy way to communicate with Nihilistic's publisher
- Documents, designs & artistic concept files are just moved from a private folder to the publisher's public folder and then the publisher can see them
- Delivering on design milestones & allowing the publisher to see things being worked on has become much easier
Additional Benefits:
- Great visual tools, uploading art galleries, & scrolling through rich images
- Good methods for setting up databases
- Allows people to get tasks done & hand tasks off to other people
- It is simple to use for not just hard core programmers, but artists, designers, and producers
- New features & bug fixes to Central Desktop come every few months
- Nihilistic's entire development cycle has become more efficient
- There are less mistakes, redos, and rethinking of decisions that tends to be common in the industry
- The efficiency gains enable Nihilistic to:
- Develop higher quality, better, more competitive games
- Get better game ratings
- Get better review scores
- More acclaim from the press
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"We evaluated a lot of different systems and spent about two weeks literally trying a dozen different hosted solutions. We set a basic skeleton framework up on each one. Central Desktop is the one that we liked the most."
- Robert Huebner, CEO
See it in Action:
Click Thumbnail below
Nihilistic Software uses custom tabs within each workspace to manage the various stages of game development.Each new project gets a customized home screen with links to the most important information for each department involved in game development.Nihilistic's tech department uses it's section of the workspace to manage feature requests, design briefs, and other necessary documents.Nihilistic Software's workspaces are created for each new game in development.Nihilistic Software utilizes the Central Desktop version tracked file sharing to share files among it's internal and external collaborators.Each department at Nihilistic has it's own area for sharing files, announcements, etc.Nihilistic Software creates task lists for each department involved in game development. This allows each department to work individually and collaboratively on every stage of development.Nihilistic makes use of the Table Of Contents feature in Central Desktop to keep track of all of the pages within each of it's workspaces.
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