Group collaboration advice (updating docs)

Hey guys im currently running into a group collaboration issue and would appreciate any advice. My group has been writing the story for our game in google docs and it's grown to the point now where whenever someone needs to update something like changing a character's name, we have to go in and manual go through each page and do it. I've looked into creating wikis but unfortunately i don't know the mark up language to edit and create pages (c++ back ground) and neither does anyone else on the team so im curious to know how you guys are dealing with group collaboration projects.

 

You might want to bite the bullet and choose some wiki software. DokuWiki and PmWiki are popular wikis that are relatively easy to use. Bananadance looks like it might be really easy to use, too. Or consider Wordpress. Some teams use Wordpress as an internal wiki.

I'm of two minds about heavily hyperlinked information distributed across multiple documents (e.g., wiki pages). On the one hand, it's easy to see and follow connections. But, on the other, the sprawl can quickly get out of control.

It might be that your story document is being bloated by non-story elements such as gameplay design notes. If this is the case, you can move those to a separate document. This might make your story document shorter and less onerous to update. Speaking of hyperlinks, keep in mind that you can also add internal links to other sections in a Google doc to get connections without distributing your content across multiple documents.

On one mid-size project I'm working on, we use Slack for day-to-day communication, Trello for project management, and Google Docs for story and design documents. We were using Zoho before, particularly the wiki feature to document procedures such as how to set up a scene. But Zoho has fallen by the wayside, and those procedures are now in cards on a Trello list.

On another project, it's Slack, Trello, and Office 365, but with the same basic structure.

 

Thanks for the advice, been playing around with trello some today and it's pretty useful.