Game developers sometimes break the build.  Student game developers are especially good at it.

The SMU Guildhall introduces source control tools to students from their first team game (TGP1).  As a student Associate Producer assisting three TGP1 teams, one of my roles is to make sure they use their source control tools correctly and understand their benefits.

To date on previous projects, the student developers on my teams used Perforce www.perforce.com or Apache SVN subversion.apache.org, and in one case moved from one tool to the other early in development, causing a few headaches.

My current TGP1 teams use SVN.  As projects with four student team members, SVN's simplicity and open license make it an appropriate fit.

The team members cover basic source control usage in a class setting, and Associate Producers include instructions for SVN use in each team's ADP documentation.



Above is a sample page from a team ADP.  For first-time developers, it's important to make sure the details of our game development mechanics are in a single place.  It's intuitive that having a game plan is important.  The importance of a game plan document is something that's learned as your projects grow.

To date, my TGP1 teams have used their source control extensively, on one instance already citing source control as saving the day.  Just two weeks into development, that's not a bad reccommendation.