8 production pipeline tools to keep your game on track

Managing teams and projects can be difficult, particularly on large games developed by hundreds of staff.

To help, Develop has rounded up eight tools to manage the production pipeline, keep track of progress and versioning, and ensure your game stays on schedule.

Got a tool you think deserves a mention that isn’t listed below? Let us know and we’ll add it in.

Perforce

Company: Perforce
www.perforce.com

Perforce is a version management and collaboration tool used by a plethora of small and large triple-A games development studios across the globe.

A number of products are available to improve the workflow and power continuous delivery, including P4D, which is free for up to 20 users, Perforce Swarm, which provides a social code review and collaboration environment for the team, Perforce Commons, Git Fusion and also Perforce Insights.

Hansoft

Company: Hansoft
www.hansoft.com

Now in its eight iteration, Hansoft is an Agile tool for team collaboration and management. The firm recently brought its first round of funding to $10m, and aims to expand its operations worldwide.

The tool itself offers agile scaling to make the software compatible with “super large” companies, while the latest version delivers actionable agile metrics that allow the entire development team to access and visualise metrics to support informed decision-making.

Shotgun

Company: Shotgun Software
www.shotgunsoftware.com

Shotgun is a cloud-based toolset that has become a key part of the development pipeline for many devs.

Recently acquired by Autodesk, Shotgun includes a Pipeline Toolkit that comes with open-source APIs and tools to help build and manage the development pipeline.

The tool works out of the box with middleware such as Maya, 3ds Max and Photoshop, and has been used for games such as League of Legends, and World of Warcraft.

SourceTree

Company: Atlassian
www.sourcetreeapp.com

SourceTree is a free desktop client from Atlassian for Git and Mercurial distributed version control systems.
Available on Mac and Windows, the management tool allows developers both new and experienced to interface with distributed Git source repositories and organise them using a bookmarks window.

Other features also allow users to visualise work changes over time, detect and resolve conflicts and search commit histories for changes and review file logs.

Jira

Company: Atlassian
www.atlassian.com/software/jira

Used by thousands of teams, Jira can be harnessed to capture and organise issues, assign work and follow team activity.

Cloud and server options are available for teams with less than ten users to more than 10,000. Jira 6.3 automatically updates issues when a developer commits code in Stash or Bitbucket, and enhanced reporting in Jira Agile helps identify bottlenecks in the team’s workflow as well as gathering more accurate data on the release date of the next project.

ConceptShare

Company: ConceptShare
www.conceptshare.com

ConceptShare is a creative operations management platform designed to structure and streamline review and approval workflows.

As with many tools, ConceptShare uses analytics and reporting to highlight a project’s status and identify whether there are any bottlenecks. The tool is also flexible, built to enable developers to use it the way they want, allowing users to adjust roles, permissions, workflows and other options to ensure it fits in with the team.

Project Libre

Marc O’Brien and Laurent Chrettieneau
www.projectlibre.org

Project Libre is an open source project management application downloaded over 1m times that runs on the Java platform, and can be used on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Project Libre is actually a fork of OpenProj, which had stopped being updated in recent years, and is developed by the same founders. The tool automatically organises and tracks tasks, and can be used in conjunction with software such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

Trello

Company: Trello Inc
www.trello.com

Though it is designed as a To Do list for individual users, Trello can also be used by games development teams to manage a title’s development.

The software uses cards to show progress, and users can be dragged and dropped into specific lists depending on what they are working on. The unique visual approach allows users to see an entire project at a glance, and can be updated in real-time. Devs can also post comments, upload files, add checklists, labels, due dates and more.