Just wondering sense me and friend want to work on a game together but weren’t sure if it would work so we could make changes and help each other without being in the same room ?
Absolutely, though you’ll need a bit of practise before it’s a smooth experience.
Many people do this by copying the project files via Dropbox or similar. You need to be super careful with these methods, though, because it’s easy to get things messed up. Alternatively you can look into “version control”, which is designed for this kind of thing but has a bit of an initial learning curve.
What skillsets do you each have? A simple approach can work fine if you’re just two people and will be working in different areas, ie: one on code and the other on art.
Edit in 2022: Apparently someone ( @reemysteam ) recently found this post and “liked” it. It’s 8 years old and woefully out of date, so please kindly ignore it. For a long time now a file syncing service is more likely to break a shared project than give you success. What you need is version control software, so you should be looking into Git or Plastic or something similar to those.
Like you said we just 2 people and funny enough i’m working on code and him on art nothing fancy just our first game and we wanted to be able to talk to each other and answer each other questions and help each other from a distance so we didn’t have to be together each time any free programs that would work ? Do u think sense we have a dual monitor set up that we could have something teamviewer showing one persons view and have our ow non the other ?
Alternatively? I wouldn’t consider it an alternative.
My suggestions…
1.) Learn Git and download SmartGit as a client. I found SmartGit to be very intuitive as a source control GUI.
2.) Go to Trello.com and sign up there, it is a visual scrum board for working on projects
Screen sharing you’ll have to look into yourself. For sharing the project, I think you’ll be fine for early, simple stuff with just file sharing. However, as I’ve said in many threads, don’t stick to that if your projects or teams grow - move to a proper version control system.
For anything but the short term I completely agree. For their first few steps, though, it adds a lot of learning curve before they get to do anything.
No-one has said it, so I will. The most critical thing to understand is that two people cannot open the same project on two different computers. So, if the two of you have a network drive with the project on you cannot both open those files into your Unity.
Very true. I didn’t mean to suggest that you both work off the same shared copy of the data, but it is a possible interpretation of what I said. Thanks Graham!
Ok sort of a downer but makes sense so then would be able to both have our own copy open and then have changes made sent to one of them ? Like me and him both have it open with own unique copies in unity and when we make changes we can have one cetera lone where our changes can be saved or something ?
Do what Meltdown said and use version control.
–Eric
Probably a stupid question but is that a type of program or a unique program ?
It’s a type of program. It stores files, but where a your operating system just stores the files “as they are right now”, version control stores the entire history of a set of files, and you can navigate forward and backward and, most importantly, two people can both change stuff and the changes can be merged together.
1.) Sign up at Github for a free account
2.) Follow their tutorials and instructions
3.) Download SmartGit (use Google)
4.) And follow tutorials
oh ok cool i check them out i find a nice website that compares a few so ill give them a look.
I wouldn’t touch GIT with a 3-foot pole if you’ve never used version control before. You’re going to end up getting quite confused. Get Subversion instead. It’s the easiest option out there. And then you need online Subversion hosting. ProjectLocker.com is the most cost effective for small teams.
I tried learning Mercurial after using source control for 12 years and it was tough. Word is GIT is even tougher.
Wait! No one mentioned the unity3d asset server? We use it, and sure it costs some but it’s quite comfortable
Frankly I have no idea why that product exists. It costs a lot more than things that are quite easy to use, such as Subversion (free). I can’t imagine it’s very popular.
Asset Server is quite an old product. It’s not had much love in at least a few years. It works, obviously, but probably isn’t something for new teams to jump onto.
It also lacks fundamental features of other, superior, freely available version control systems. There’s really been no reason to put time, effort of money into the Asset Server since Unity got VCS-friendly asset serialization some time in… 3.x?
The Team License provides other value, such as the caching system. But if you want a VCS I strongly suggest looking into other available options. (And I was more or less told the same by someone from Unity just before it was made VCS-friendly - Asset Server works, but make sure I check out the other options when they’re available.)
The only reason to use the Asset Server, so far as I can tell, is if you were already using it, don’t mind the limitations, and don’t want to put effort into moving to something else.