Forums → Programming Forum → Falling Debris: A Successfull Collaboration

Hello Armor Games!
What I decided to do here is to share with you what I have learned during the past month developing
Falling Debris, good techniques, good practices some problems that happened during the
development and tools to work with a team.I also target this document to anyone interested in making games
and i encourage you to also share your opinions, suggestions and tools you use.

So before I start, take note of two things:
1.I call this a successful Collaboration ,because it started from scratch, zero budget, without a programmer, through Kongregate forums i found one (Kreg) and we made the game we wanted to make, this is not Sonny 3, it's just a simple avoider, but it was made
with discipline and passion for the Stride contest.

2.This is the first game i make in flash


Programs Used
Adobe Flash CS4
For programming and assembling everything

Autodesk 3DsMax
For the 3D Models, animations and text



Adobe Photoshop
For the menus creation and composition, color correction, additional effects and details, and retouching
some of the assets


Adobe After Effects
For particle animations like explosions, Rocket Boosters, debris, button animations and also
for the intro animation.


Audacity
For Audio Editing and additional effects



By this moment you are probably asking yourself: WTF! Do i need to know all this programs to do flash games?
The answer is no, those are just the programs i use, as a matter of fact, i don't know how to use flash
and i'm not good at vector graphics, i come from an audiovisual artist background, and i'm no graphic designer.
So stick to any program that you master when making games, if you do things in flash you will have the
advantage of having vector graphics which have smaller file size, if you don't then use any program and
try to balance your exports having in mind quality and filesize.


GDD
First of all, you want to make a game? ---> Write a Game Design Document, this document wraps up
what the game will be about and how it will work,in this case it doesn't have to be complicated
like this (PDF)
because we are making a simple avoider game, but if you are making a more complex one, you have to
specify everything in the Design Document.

For Falling Debris this was the GDD , after that i showed it to different persons and got
great feedback, feedback at this time is crucial, because later on is going to be harder
to change things as you progress.


Teamwork Tools

Google Docs
We used google docs to read ,modify the GDD and share it with other people for feedback.

Live Messenger
We used Live Messenger to stay in contact when we worked, and also to chat about changes that
needed to be done

Dropbox
Dropbox is the key teamwork tool here. Dropbox is an application that
syncs a folder from a pc to any other PCs that log with the same account, and also it uploads
the contents of the folder to the web, where you can share, upload or delete them anywhere you are.

One really nice thing about dropbox is the fact that you can share a public link of any file you have
in the public folder, and if you delete a file by mistake (happened to us) you can always return
to a previous version

You can see our Dropbox layout here

When we where using Dropbox, we realized that it was better to have a To Do text file with the things to do
than to have to read them and edit them from the google document, it was easier.

SWF Cabin
SWF Cabin was used to test alpha and beta versions of the game in the web


Resources

I had a hard time finding some decent royalty free music for the game, most of the music in the Collabs
and on Newgrounds Audio Portal is not royalty free (i know that in some cases you could ask the autor
for permission and they give it to you) and most of the free music i found out was 8-bit and didn't
go along with the game. Remember, we have 0 budget...I was so desperate at a moment that i even
tought of using classical music like Richard Strauss - Also Sprach Zarathustra for the intro,
but then i found out about Incompetech, which is a place that runs a guy called Kevin MacLeoud,
he offers a lot of music for free as long as you give credit, as a matter of fact, i stumbled with some
music i've heard in games made by Armor Games and other developers.

I found some music that suited the game in a way, but this is not the best option to follow, it was now,
because we had no budget, but if we had some, we would have hired a music composer.

And for the rest of the audio in the game, comes from mixes and edited pieces i made from
Freesound
They have a great sound effects library, with great quality

So, go and play "Falling Debris"//www.kongregate.com/games/Kreg/falling-debris, rate it and tell us what you think.