Posts Tagged ‘code swarm’

code swarm

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

filesyumyum

Game development is a very collaborative process. The contributions to a game project like ilomilo come from people with widely varying skills.

Artists build 3D models that are brought to life by animations and textures.
Level designers, well, they design the quirky levels…
Programmers (like me) mess around with the code to make all parts work together.

What if you could visualize this complex process?
Well, we made an attempt, using the sweet tool “code swarm”.

The video clip below shows the history of ilomilo so far, as interpreted by code swarm. The dots represent changes made to the files in the project and the colors show different types of work. Green and yellow dots represent code changes, blue dots are graphics, red are sounds etc… The floating texts represent the people working on the project.

So, here you go!
One year of ilomilo development, compressed to a one minute incomprehensible video.
I don’t expect any of you to make any sense out of it, but it certainly is fun to watch.

To view the movie in all it’s full size glory, click this link (and set it to 480p):
ilomilo swarm

The big explosion at the end shows very accurately how Gordon (mgar) removed all files and then added them again.