Investigation

No French game developper contacted me. I guess that I have to explain why I asked this in order to get some contacts.
First, I don't want your money. I don't want to contact you in order to get a job in your team. I am quite pleased with my current job (software architect is somewhat cool, you know) and I'm not going to change now. Next, I'm not going to sell you something. I don't have any ubertool for you, and you won't buy my game ideas - because you already have tons of them.
The reason why I want to get in touch with you is that I'm trying to promote game development in the south of France. I'm just beginning this neverending quest, and I still don't know what to do. That's why I want to speak to professional game developpers. I just want to find some informations about their needs, their dreams, and maybe their gf but this has nothing to do with the subject.

Project management

DisclaimerI'm dreaming. I don't have enough time to implement such kind of software, but I find the concept rather cool.Last year, I thought to how I would do a design document. My idea was to use a wiki-based system with an automatic ordering mecanism associated to some PDF printing capabilities. Unfortunately, like every idea I have, I don't have time to write this (I did some experimentation with phpwiki, but nothing very advanced). Here is a requirement list for such kind of tool:

• User is allowed to write formatted text
  
• User is allowed to link documents to the text (images, MS Word documents, PDF, web links, ...)
  
• Since it is a wiki, the user must be able to create links to the other pages he created
  

I thought to this during the past month, and I believe that such system can be easily extended to something more usable.
First, the design document is not restricted to a gameplay document. It should also defines what are the needed resources - and if it defines the resources, why don't it store them? As a consequence, I need to integrate a resource management system that would allow me to store different versions of the same resource. The versionning system could also be used to track down the changes in the design document itself.
Next, I can't see why I should be able to manage the resources and not the code itself. Thus it would be nice to integrate a sophisticated software configuration management tool (SCM) - a la Perforce - along with a bug list management tool.
I can now manage the design document and the source code. There is a missing step between these two items: the software specification document and the detailed software design. This is more tricky part, because it would be nice to be able to create and store UML diagrams. Of course, this could be done in an external software (er... writing an UML modeler using AJAX is probably not teh funnay).
Having both the source code and the software design document in a centralied place, I can link them to have a clear idea of what's have to be done. The only mising point here is how long it will take to implement a feature - thus we need a project management software. We'll be able to define teams, individuals, assign their roles, watch out their progress, and so on.
Everything centralized in a web browser. I guess the idea is cool, but I believe the development time of such a beast is something along the line of 1 to 2 years. Anyway, I also believe their is a market for this tool - as it specifically target software development teams (and not only game dev teams). Anybody wants to fund a company?

Time, lack of

This is not god. I tried to do an entry for Ravuya's contest, and I came up with a good idea, a good enough code base. But in the end, my worst enemy (time, the one which tries to kill you during your whole life, and which will win at the end) stopped me. I needed two more days, but I wasn't able to find them.

Work, loads of

The company I work for is actively hiring software engineers in the south of France - and in other areas of France as well. There are no game development relate jobs (but who knows...), but the company is a good one - it is fair and loyal to its employees (not like most of the service industry) and the projects are challenging. Contact me for further informations ;) (and yes, the south of France is really great).