In this blog post I want to talk a bit about how we do project management. If you are an indie game developer you might say, “I don’t care about project management. All I want to do is games.” If you are the only person working on your game you don’t need to care about it. However as soon as you start working together with (or for) someone else you’ll need to find a reasonable way to communicate with each other.

Since Understanding Games we are using the web-based project collaboration tool Basecamp (affiliate link) for our written communication, alongside Skype for chat and discussing things in person. Here are some of the advantages of using Basecamp over E-Mails and plain notes.

Keep track

Basecamp enables you to assign and keep track of to-dos and milestones. While a to-do is usually a small task, a milestone stands for a bigger goal that you want to achieve until a certain date. Both to-dos and milestones allow for sending notifications or reminder via email, so you won’t need to check for them manually. A common workflow for us looks like this: I assign a to-do to Martin to compose a music loop for our next game. We discuss some ideas (style and atmosphere of the music, length of the tracks, what file format to use) on the message thread of the actual to-do. Once Martin has composed something, he uploads an mp3 on the same thread. In this way the complete discussion happens in one place and does not get mixed up with other discussions.

Prioritize

Basecamp also lets you keep track of milestones and any recent activity in all of your projects from within the Dashboard view. This way we can easily priorize which tasks need to be done next and what the other team members are doing.

History of communication

When you do your team discussions on Basecamp, it’s really easy to go back and see what you actually agreed on. Can’t remember if it was BF-SUCC.mp3 or BF-SUCC2.mp3 that sounded better? You won’t need to browse through all your emails. Just look into the according message thread.

Work asynchronous

We don’t have an office and we work from different cities in different countries. We have other jobs and freelancer gigs on the side, so we seldom work at the same time. Having all important information about our projects on Basecamp frees us from the necessaries of asking each other in real-time how something was supposed to be done.

For small indie teams Basecamp can feel a bit costly (paid plans start at $24/month) but from our experience the improved team communication makes this investment worth it. There is also a free 30-day trail and a free plan (one project, no file sharing).

Jan Heinemann wrote at Thursday 27. August 2009:

We are also using the tool though i miss the function of setting deadlines with days and hours. that would make it a lot easier to sort different milestones that are due at the same day. Also a function to priorize todos would be nice. anyways, high recommendation from our side.

Andreas wrote at Sunday 30. August 2009:

At one company I worked at we would write P1, P2 or P3 in front of the todo and reorder the list accordingly via drag and drop. This can get a bit tedious with long lists, but usually works quite well.

Till Terschüren wrote at Thursday 3. September 2009:

We decided to use Basecamp for the planning of next years HORST Festival in Mönchengladbach, Germany, a free Music Festival. I am really exicted how it works with people who absolutely have no touch with online-tools except E-Mail and a project that is absolutely set in the “real world”. By the way, the smallest plan starts at 12$.

Andreas wrote at Thursday 3. September 2009:

Nice to hear about everyone’s experience! I think 37signals had a $12 plan, but it seems they have reduced the number of paid plans with the cheapest starting at $24 (see basecamphq.com/signup).