Collaborative design software?

YunusWesley

Hey all. Some pretty intense conversations with 1) a writer-musician-filmmaker and 2) a computer game designer are making me very curious about collaboration software. Sharing code, sharing images, realtime joint manipulation of elements. Being more on the outsider art side of creative work, and not at all a programmer, the creativity in story gaming community suggests I am not alone in wondering about tools for working together.

Any thoughts?

Destriarch

I made something of the nature for Diaspora, on the iPhone / iPad. It's a free app called Pocket Clusters, so check it out if you like but be warned that I've not had time to test *all* of its features on iOS4.2 yet. Should work, but it might be a bit unstable.

Anyway, the basic idea is that it allows all players at the table (that have a suitable device) to contribute to making the 'Cluster' (space map) of the area that they will be adventuring in. Individual systems can be delegated to different players to design, while anyone can view the map as a whole to see what everyone else has been writing so far. It sets up an ad hoc network, so all data is shared quickly and wirelessly around the table. It's a fairly simple little app, but I'm quite proud of it.

-Ash

jlcsusara

Doesn't GoogleDocs do that already?

Matthijs

"Sharing" is a fairly wide term, like "writing" - I guess it depends what you want to share, with who, how, why?

For "Love in the Time of Seið", Jason and I used Google Wave for the initial ideas/structuring phase, and then went on to Google Docs for writing the text. Then we went to e-mail for sending & discussing the design.

At work, we use Subversion for working on the same code.

I think that in the initial stages of design, when ideas are just flowing about and getting mutated all the time, you probably need something as versatile as the blank page of Google Docs. However, a shared mind-map could also be good - I haven't seen any really good ones, though; probably because I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.

TylerT

i really like google wave, it's going to end soon but i'm interested to see what there plans are with the tech