Managing the Design, Scope and Progress

It is great having a head full of ideas, but without quantifying them and how they all fit together it will be VERY tough for you to make real progress, and this is even more important if you are working with a team of people.

Idea & Task Tracking

Generally a good idea for managing the project is to have some sort of central ideas hub, and its important to not just have ideas but information around those ideas, like how long you think it will take, who is working on it, what dependencies that has on other tasks etc.

There are plenty of free Agile tools which help solve this problem, such as Trello, Youtrack, Jira as well as many more. Even source control hosts like Github come with built in ticketing systems and extensions that allow you to use them like agile boards.

We will focus on the tool with the least effort required to setup, share and work with, which in this case will be Trello. It is free to host your own projects on there and is very configurable and easy to use. We will see later on why other tools would be better suited to larger development projects.

So imagine that you have started on your prototype and you have done some animation bits you have some basic AI and you are needing someone to come in and implement some sort of inventory system. How do you tell this person what you want? do you just give them a verbal description? write it all down in a word document for them? just tell them high level ideas and hope they get it right?

If you use a project board like the ones above it is very easy to just create a some small encapsulated tasks which explain to anyone on your project what you expect from it, and is also helps everyone know how far along a project is and if someone comes up with an idea everyone else can comment on it in one place and track it's progress.

Available Tooling

As mentioned above there are plenty of free online tools for tracking tasks/ideas, such as the already mentioned:

Also there are source control systems (more discussion on source control later) which support issues being raised inside them as a means to track ideas and tasks.

There are also plenty of other related tools out there to help with things from mind mapping to collaberative sketching or diagram drawing etc. Even simple things like team communication can be streamlined these days with tools like below:

There is also always Skype or other simpler messaging tools, and some other things worth mentioning are:

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