So we’ve got a wiki set up for document storage and collaborative design, and we’ve got this blog for communications, thinking out loud and stuff. But there’s absolutely a need for something more robust — asset management, version control, threaded discussions and so forth. I was going to go the bog-standard route of either fudging it and putting up forums, or maybe putting together one of the usual groupware suspects on the server.

But then I found this wicked cool toy: Collanos. (complete with their development blog — I like how they think).

It’s Peer-To-Peer groupware. Discussions, filesharing (note to RIAA: OUR files, not YOUR files), task management and so forth. Just like server-based software, except there’s no server.

Is it perfect? No. Tasks are clunky and there’s no unified view of them. There’s no calendaring. And I’ve yet to determine whether it’ll play nice with my draconian corporate firewall. But it’s dynamic and interesting enough to give it a go, and at the very least it’s an excellent file distribution method — and maybe, just maybe, if we bash it hard enough, these guys might be interested in hearing our feedback and making some shifts in the code to better accommodate the needs of an indie game dev team.

If it passes the firewall test we’ll move ahead with it — it looks cool and very usable, so here’s hoping.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Game Design.