It has been quite a while in the coming but I have finally managed to get to the development of the Overlord Online website. I had been planning to do something with the domain from the day that I bought it, but I got side-tracked by other projects and work ... but finally it is now starting to take shape.

Overlord Online aims to assist the Indie Game Developer in managing their projects and keeping in touch with not only their team members; but also their community members who may have a vested interest in their projects. By using the best Open Source tools combined with the best game-developer orientated project management software we aim to achieve just this; while keeping the costs as low as possible.

I achieve this by using two Open Source tools and one commercial tool. I have been using these tools myself for a long time and I can vouch for them, they are the best at what they do and they do it well.

PHP Overlord: By giving development teams a central location for messages, task updates, and checklists, they can stay focused on creating their game or mod, instead of constantly worrying about who’s doing what, when it’s going to be done, or what they are supposed to be doing. With advanced task management options, there will never be a question about what each team member’s assignments and responsibilities are, or what their progress is, everyone can see exactly what’s going on at any time by checking the project overview.

Drupal: The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic brochureware website or an interactive community website.

Subversion: Subversion is well-known in the open source community and is used on many open source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, KDE, Free Pascal, FreeBSD, GCC, Python, Django, Ruby, Mono, SourceForge.net, ExtJS and Tigris.org. Google Code also provides Subversion hosting for their open source projects. BountySource systems use it exclusively. Codeplex offers access to both Subversion as well as other types of clients.

These will be set-up in a hosted environment and I will be providing optional extras for theme modification and logo creation. There is also a central control panel that handles some of the more mundane tasks for the users.

I plan on keeping the service as cheap as possible and hopefully this will assist some Indie Developers out there to focus on making their games and not worrying about managing the team as much.