FG_Jens

We do, but underwear related complaints are much more common.

SVN server for all files. Skype for daily IM and weekly voice chat. Wiki for documentation like design document, story etc. That's pretty much it tech/tools, well regular email as well.

One or more people need to organize and take charge of everything, even for indies you need hierarchy.

Individuals need to be able to work on their own, individually so to speak. A key factor at frictional is that you have a broad knowledge, for example an artists does everything needed in the art section, including building levels. With some variations, for example Marcus always gets thrown animation work and Rasmus does most (if not all) concepts.

It's important that the team sees progress, have rules for daily commits to SVN, have weekly meetings where you talk about what you are working on, and perhaps monthly meetings where you in detail have "show and tell" as we call them. Where you try out, listen, look, examine each others work.

Take scheduels and budgets seriously. They are not meant to be set in stone, they are meant to be in constant change adjusting after how well/bad things go and other things that influence. But having goals to reach is important and as you progress the schedule and budget gets perfected, if not for progress it does so for your ability to cut the unnecessary.

For me personally I have worked from my home for many years, so I have started to forget some of the old problems of motivation and self-control. It is no doubt a lot more difficult to work on a project in your spare time compared to doing it full-time, coming home from school or work and then sitting down takes effort. Definitely will have to sacrifice something in order to do it.

Three main things that I spontaneously know are useful:

1. TODO list, always have a text document where you list all the things that you need to do. The more detailed the better. For example, don't write "Do monster sounds" write "Do monster sounds for Scary Dude 2000. 5 x hunting sounds, 3 x death sounds, 3 x footsteps for metal, wood, dirt. And so on". Without a TODO list it is very easy that you just stare at the screen and have a hard time knowing where to start, so use a TODO and prioritize the content in it!

2. Often when you sit down to work it can be hard to get started. You put of getting started, you might browse reddit a bit and so on. The solution is "simple". When you sit down to start working, START WORKING. It will be a bit slow and not very motivating, but if you keep concentrating after 15-20 minutes it goes away, and as soon as it goes away you quickly find that you spent 4 hours working.

3. Argh, forgot the third while writing the above! This was not it, but if you are stuck on something, then move on and work on something else, or if you are not completely motivated one day, work on something that does not require the same amount of motivation. An example of a situation where I do this is when I am about to start scripting a level, at the start when I know I have many many hours ahead of me writing script, doing sounds, implementing, testing and testing and tweaking and tweaking ahead of me, I begin by looking over the level and just checking how well it is optimized. Then I optimize lights, shadows and collisions among other things, these does not require motivation, they are more of a tinkering thing and gets the mind in the mood to be motivated.

Hope it helps.

The current plan is to continue supporting GNU/Linux as we have in the past.

Not the only reason, but one of the main reason originally was to not have patrolling enemies that the player constantly have to avoid. We wanted to have enemies more as one time encounter and when you succeeded avoiding them you would not have to repeat it over and over.

Thomas goes into more details about the enemy design in the GDC presentation, http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014889/Evoking-Emotions-and-Achieving-Success

You get very immune, when you know exactly how everything works it is very difficult to know how well you have done with the game until others actually have played it. Often having people test the game is not enough to get a clear view either, as the people testing are doing a job, they don't completely go into the mood of getting scared.

But definitely sometimes you do get scared, perhaps someone worked on something in a level that you do not know about or a monster does something unexpected. There was in particular one time when I was working with the sound for one of the machine and I was very concentrated on pulling levers and listening to how it sounded - I did not notice the monster that came into the room until he did the attack sound just behind my back. Sure it was a jump scare, but even so...