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Game Design Doc in a Wiki

TuismTuism
edited in Questions and Answers
So, looking for some collaboration tools, I found a couple of articles on this:
20 reasons to kill the word doc and use a wiki for your GDD

Basically it boils down to having a singular point of contact for dropping your project info so that people can stay up to date without emailing millions of versions of files, which is absolutely awesome. And history and stuff. Sounds great.

Does anyone have any experience on this? And found great wiki softwares that are easy to use? That caters for wysiwyg tables? That is editable on iPad? I've done some searching (from my iPad since I'm not at home) and found a bunch, but I really haven't the foggiest which is good.

This matrix seems to compare a bunch that fits a few criteria I put into it but it's still completely overwhelming for me...

Wiki matrix comparison tool thing

Comments

  • KarujiKaruji
    Or you could just use Google Docs ;)
    Thanked by 1someone_else
  • TuismTuism
    Not untrue, but does it have version control, history that you can roll back, restricting access to this and that part of the doc, links?

    Don't have anything against docs, I use it all the time, but if I want one place for everything, docs may be a bit more fragmented.

    I remember google wave. I wanted to use that for collab projects and even implemented it. Eventually it just failed SOOOO hard.
  • ElyaradineElyaradine
    Not untrue, but does it have version control, history that you can roll back, restricting access to this and that part of the doc, links?
    Yes. :)

    ...except, maybe, for the bit about restricting access to a specific part of the document. I don't know about that one.
  • KarujiKaruji
    edited
    There is version control and access restrictions on GDocs. But not sure how you could restict access to specific parts.
  • dislekciadislekcia
    I'm sure I've said this before, but we use TRAC as our design wiki right now. It integrates with bug-tracking and our SVN, which is awesome :)
  • TuismTuism
    Ok will look into TRAC, would you say that it is higher level competency stuff? Like needing to know how to change things and code it, etc?

    This article speaks about wiki too: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4094/learning_the_ways_of_the_game_.php?page=1
    And refers to Twiki.

    I didn't know google docs had history tracking and rolling back. Could it tell you "these changes were made by whoever since you last worked of this" or something similar?

    I'm on my iPad right now so my google docs research hit a dead end since I didn't even see the option to start a new collection/folder :p
  • mikegeysermikegeyser
    I don't mean to 'be that guy' (@dislekcia :P), but github.com is pretty neat with that kind of integration as well - issues, wiki, great tooling, cheap cloud hosting, as well as the git revision control features. I'm not going to pull any punches though, git is not the most accessible revision control system. It's a chainsaw tool; powerful, but you could hurt yourself badly.

    I think it's wise (in any kind of software development) to tie your documentation into what you're actually producing as much as possible in order to keep it sustainably fresh and up-to-date, otherwise you'll be dealing with design artifacts that are cumbersome to update and seldom relevant. (eg: Yeah, we were going to do it that way, but we changed our mind because of XYZ.) A wiki goes a long way toward fixing this just by itself (and democratizing the documentation process), but it can also be further integrated into your source files (images or text) - exactly (I think) in the way that QCF uses.
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