Hi, I'm quite obviously new to software development in general, but a group of friends and I would like to develop a video game, however we have no idea how to work on the same project at the same time. I have looked at things like Github and sourceforge, but we don't quite understand the whole thing and would prefer not to have our project open source. Currently, I just have the workspace in a shared dropbox folder, but I don't think that is going to work once we really start working on this all of the time. If there is somewhere I should look for more information, I'd really appreciate a link.

There are other websites that give you private repositories without paying, one example is Bitbucket. If you never used version control you will find Mercurial/hg easier to use than git. git does basically the same with much more complicated commands that allow a bit more freedom with advanced features, without configuring it first to allow them.

You are right about getting a proper version control system. Not using version control feels like jumping from a plane without a parachute. The ability to roll back in time and look at the full history of the project is a very important thing.

If you are just looking for the academic side, wanting to know what it is, what it does, where it has been, and where it is going, there is a pretty good writeup from a few years back by Eric Raymond (a superstar in the open source world).

You first need to decide what kind of version control system is best for your group. There are many variants and they are all described in that article above.

Once you have that, you need to have a machine that can host it. You can buy or rent computer time from a dedicated host. If you configure it correctly you can also host it yourself on someone's home machine.

Then you just do it: Get the software, install it, configure it, and run it.

Github has private accounts, it's used by thousands of companies developing commercial software. I think it's under $10 a month which gives you several private repo's.

One thing to remember is that github != git. Github has a workflow and a lot of tools to make your life easier, and there are a ton of third party services that hook into github. As far as platforms as a service for source control, no one really touches github, and you have to factor that in to your larger decision on which source control software to use.

Beyond that I would just say stick with a distributed source control system like Mercurial or Git. If you want to be able to manage different branches and merge code without pulling your hair out, don't touch Subversion.

I would just say stick with a distributed source control system like Mercurial or Git. If you want to be able to manage different branches and merge code without pulling your hair out, don't touch Subversion.

There are benefits and drawbacks to each solution.

While the ability to branch easily is often cited as a benefit, discovering that you suddenly have 1.2GB to sync and store because of a few binary file branches is certainly a drawback. It isn't just the download time, it is also the fact that even 2TB and 3TB drives run out of space way too quickly these days. If you work on a very large game that contains a few hundred gigabytes of raw assets the storage requirements of distributed systems can quickly grow into multiple terabytes. When you enter that type of model, the relatively high cost of Perforce becomes cheap relative to the indirect costs you encounter with DVCS.

Every feature is a tradeoff. Every system is different. For example, distributed version control has benefits of data locality and easier branches, and comes with a potentially serious cost of storage and sync, added complexity to keeping everyone together, and the mental cost of keeping track of which branch does what. Your project might be better with one option or with the other.

Choosing the best version control sultion is an area where there are many options that are tailored to different development styles. Learn about them all and select carefully.

Wouldn't the size problem be reduced if you avoid putting continuously updated precompiled binary files into git/mercurial and dont add all kinds of external stuff you depend on into a single repository but instead have some sub-repositories?

You could also split it up to put the source art files, the compiled art files, the compiled code into 3 svn repositories, to reduce the load in the dvcs further by only having source code inside. Or add some custom merge tool for some binary files or convert them when storing into the repository to make them mergeable.

Maybe on bigger projects people have some buildserver already that compiles everything for testing commits, that could also update the separate svn repositories for compiled things, for the artists to avoid having to compile code and the programmers avoiding to convert art files themself?

There are other websites that give you private repositories without paying, one example is Bitbucket. If you never used version control you will find Mercurial/hg easier to use than git. git does basically the same with much more complicated commands that allow a bit more freedom with advanced features, without configuring it first to allow them.