How to manage game objects, npcs, items? [closed]

Question

i'm making a small 2D game, designed the maps with Tiled, and adding "basic" world object/items/npcs/mobs to test it a bit and have fun. Now i have encountered a relatively huge problem, with further development of the world, as our small team has grown by 3 volunteers we have to cover large amounts of (note most of this data, other than AI, is JSON)

• quests
• items
• npcs
• mobs
• skills
• armor
• weapons

we tried to keep track of the editing with revisions, comments, we also used milestones for patching/fixes/hotfixes, and so on.

Our basic tools:

• Spreadsheet, which has served well but we discovered that we can't do much with revisions of on a game item or weapon.
• we also tried Redmine, but other than issues, this doesn't serve our needs

Can some suggest and alternative way of managing this, or any opens-source tool? that will just make our development a bit easier, than the pain that its right now.

Or is one of those situations that we need to develop a specific tool for our needs?

Answer 1

I recommend that you use any text format that is readable enough for you and then use a decentralized source control manager such as Git.

Then people can work on their own and push their changes to everyone else when ready, and with good "diff" tools etc. Look up the tool "gitk" for a GUI version.

Answer 2

Did you try to use a wiki? It's collaborative and it saves revisions. You can try https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence which is easy to setup and costs 10$ a year for 10 users or 10$/mo for a hosted solution. Of course you can use any open source alternative like Mediawiki or something simpler

Answer 3

Sounds like you simply want to save your files in a text format and source control to merge changes.

Excel is particularly bad for cooperative work, same goes for any Office product (not just Microsoft Office). The problem being that no two people can work on the same document, at least not with lots of hassles. Plus you still have to export the data in a readable format.

Wikis aren't designed for creating and exporting game data in the first place, so don't even begin to look into those. They do however work well to share documentation and knowledge.

As for the text-based data format try to avoid XML because unless properly formatted it'll be a merge nightmare with source control. It will also require you to use a proper XML parser that provides good error reporting, otherwise you'll find yourself chasing an extraneous angle bracket inlined somewhere in regular text.

Any basic text format (ie INI style) suffices. I personally find Lua scripts and specifically Lua's table data structure to be very powerful because you can not just declare data in a text file but you can also programmatically create and (if needed) verify it, avoiding lengthy and error-prone copy & paste editing.