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To start off, I must say that I am a relative newbie to the programming world. I have made a game in Unity - kind of an arcade shooter thing, sort of - but I haven't gotten deep into programming before.

So, I decided to use DarkBASIC this time around because why not? So I bought the beginner's book (it'll be here sometime within the next two weeks) and I plan on relearning everything from the ground up. I also plan on reading books about game engines, mathematics for game programming, and game AI.

But of course that's all for the future.

Right now, I'm more heavily defining the game that I'm going to make (some form of side-scrolling RPG with a bit of multiplayer, just so I can say I did). Somebody else may join me after a few months of me developing solo.

So, I was just wondering - how would you collaborate, if you can, with DarkBASIC? How would one go about doing that? I've thought of programming diagrams and stuff like that, but how would one merge collaborations and establish pipelines etc.? Anyone here done this before? And how would you deal with someone jumping into the project after it's been in development for a while? How would you show them how the game's working etc.?

Thanks for any help!

It is possible, even over the internet.

First of all you must be dedicated: If you want people to follow your lead you have to show them that you know what you're doing, this requires a good knowledge of the language you're using, which it sounds like you don't have yet, and evidence that you can see a project through, which means you'll need to make a game on your own first or at least show that you've put a lot of work into your project and have a clear plan of where to take it.

Next, you must inspire people and make your project as important to them as it is to you: it's not enough to just grab the first set of people who say they want to make a game, they have to be dedicated to the project too.

Both these factors are reasons why it is a good idea to hold off making a team until you have something to show for yourself / for the project. If you have something cool to show you will inspire people and they will be excited to help and more than willing to follow your lead. But even once you've gained interest you should still hold out, don't accept people's offers for help based on nothing but words: if they're interested great but you need dedicated people, and if they're dedicated they will start tinkering with the code on their own. Oh I didn't mention the open source part but yeah! If you want people to help you out (and find out who can actually help you) then you can't be secretive with your code, posting a few screen shots isn't good enough, you must let people get their teeth into your project to develop any lasting interest in its development.

And that's just the recruitment part! Yes these may seem like strict standards to uphold but it's far better to have a small team and get the job done slowly than a large team that flails about with members constantly leaving and/or getting angry at each other and falling apart leaving a mass of unusable code. You need stability first, speed second.

Welcome to the Forums,
The best way to manage your code is with software versioning and revision control systems.
Especially when working with a team or by yourself to backup your code.
It's best to get yourself familiar with these now.
A lot of open source projects use "TortoiseSVN" which will allow you to check out a copy of the code.
TortoiseSVN is free open source and works well with DBpro.
Here is the link.

http://tortoisesvn.net/



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Hello xwolfhunter - Welcome to the forums

There are many methods for shared team projects, both paid for and somewhat free... but Stab in the Dark software's suggestion is down a good direction

Going off what Stab in the Dark software said, Subversion is a great solution for open source code management. A good companion to TortoiseSVN client is Google code: https://code.google.com/. Start a project for free on the Google code hosting site, and you will be given a subversion repository with basically unlimited space. You can then use the SVN client to commit files to the repository, download new changes, and keep track of who is working on what file. I use version control for my projects, even when I'm working on them alone. It provides a great way to backup files - it even stores a copy of every version of your code. It is a little confusing to set up at first, but once you get the hang of the workflow it's a great pipeline to use

Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. I was talking to my father about it, and he suggested Git. I checked it out, and if it's good enough for Kernel programmers, it's good enough for me.

@OBese87: I meant more along the lines of my friend and I maybe working together on a project, but what you said is good all the same. Thanks! Also - that 20-line game that IBOL made - that stuff is FUN. If you're making a jacked-up and fancy version of that, count me as a fan. You got a blog I can follow? I have a thing for following blogs . . .

@xwolfhunter

Same goes for friends really. If they are good friends then they will stick around through the monotonous parts but be careful not to fall out with each other if you are not finding it fun any more, it can get stressful and it's all too easy to blame each other for mistakes. Never be afraid to start again, if you think you've learned a better way to do something then redo it; bad code will only cause further problems down the line.


Thanks. I was thinking about making a blog for the PG tutorials I'm doing, makes more sense than having multiple threads.

@OBese87: Good advice, thanks. I'll be sure to do that in my development endeavors.