To stay interesting between releases, we decided to write a series of behind-the-scenes posts, explaining how we do things internally to produce our game. So here goes the first post, about our team communication.

Slack

Most of our communication is through the CoU Development Slack team, (Tiny Speck created a second great product, if you're considering using it for a team!)

In the Slack team, we discuss new features, user feedback, blog updates (notice the right sidebar), store things for later reference, monitor deployment, and a lot of other things.

The Outside World

Not only can we communicate with each other through Slack, Robert has set up all sorts of fancy integrations with the game and other things. When you send emails to [email protected], the messages show up in our communications group, where we can use the /email "<email>" "<subject>" "<message>" command to reply. We also get notified of new tweets mentioning Glitch/CoU-related accounts in the #twitter channel. We can all tweet as @childrenofur in the communications group by using the /tweet <message> command.

Google+ Hangouts

Another large amount of communication is through Google+ Hangouts, which we use for communicating things that we don't feel like typing (or need to do quickly/together, such as releasing game updates), and for live development time with video call screen sharing.

We were also considering doing live public development sessions, or recording a few for you to watch, if you guys want us to. Say something in the comments if you would be interested!

Trello

We communicate goals and feature timeline planning through Trello, a great list organization tool.

Here, we keep a list of cards for each planned release time goal (sooner/higher priority to the left, larger undertakings to the right), and each card is a feature we want to put into the game. Trello cards can contain files, checklists, which are great for marking which steps to implement a feature have been taken and which ones still need work, and members ("here, I want you to do this one thing, but I'll do another thing"). It's pretty satisfying to archive a card when you're done with it.

That's it for this post! All three of these tools are great and we strongly recommend them (no, we do not pay for any of them and they do not pay us to love them. They're just awesome!)

— Klikini