Matti and I, throughout almost our entire programming career together, have wanted a way to create diagrams for our games' design. It's always been really difficult to convey exactly how we're wanting things to work, and every now and then we'd mess up and not understand the other perfectly, forcing us to make adjustments to our design in order to not lose many hours of work.
Finally, we found something that suits our needs. Cacoo.com is providing an excellent service (although, the fact that they're attempting to charge money for more than 25 sheets is absolute bullshit) in which we're able to create all sorts of diagrams for various things. We've spent a few hours just now working on the design for our next project, which is going to be a lot more ambitious than the last. Now that we have this tool, we hope our code will not end up sloppy. We're able to design the classes, what properties they'll need, what functions they'll need, and make notes on how they should behave. We can visually see how everything fits together, and thus, we can design our project before we start coding (instead of designing it as we coded).
I'll make a post tomorrow about the next project. It's multiplayer, and it should be tons of fun. It's going to require a lot more time than our previous projects, simply because of the scale, but I think we should be able to release it in parts. Think of it as a bunch of mini-projects tacked together to create a bigger project. Details tomorrow. Bed now.
Cacoo looks nice. We use LucidChart for our small team (also on the freemium model).
ReplyDeleteYeah, I looked at LucidChart -- my main problem with it is that the limit of 60 objects is absolutely ridiculous, and I really can't justify spending money on something like this. I mean -- if we wanted to, we could devote a few weeks and come up with something that would suit our needs, and not have to fork over the money monthly.
ReplyDeleteThe one thing I like about LucidChart is that it's not made in Flash. Flash performs terribly in almost every case, and as such I avoid it like the plague. Cacoo IS in Flash, unfortunately, but luckily it doesn't suffer from too many lag problems.
Also, once again it appears I've neglected to make a post during the promised time....