Google is an RPG Maker's Best Friend, whether you're a team or just one person. Options

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Are you an RPG Maker (or Game Maker) and want:

• Free website hosting?
• An easier way to share and store documents related to your game online?
• An easier way to share information and collaborate with your team members?
• A free blog for posting progress updates for your game?

All you need to get all of this and more... is a Google Account. (click here to sign up)

Once you've created a Google Account, you can use the services listed below to your advantage

Google Sites (Click here to learn more)

Google Docs and Spreadsheets (Click here to learn more)

Blogger (Owned by and integrated with Google) (Click here to learn more)

Each one has the power to make your project more productive.

Google Sites

If you're looking at this you're probably interested in getting free website hosting. When you sign up for a Google Account, you automatically get access to free website hosting. You can put whatever you want on this personalized website, from information about your game to contact information to a link to download the latest version to the game's production blog to a walkthrough for the game as it is now. (these last two we'll get into later) Anything goes! You don't even have to learn any web coding languages! It's all WYSIWYG!

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

You might be wondering why you'd want to use an online text editing utility in relation to your project. Imagine the following scenario. You're writing a walkthrough for your game, but your game isn't finished yet, and you want to publish it online so other people to be able to see the walkthrough and also have it centrally located so you don't have to do any mucking about in forums to post its contents. You also want it so you can edit the walkthrough as you go and the public can see the latest updates to the walkthrough without you having to do anything more than save your changes. Google Docs can do all this for you, free! Simply publish the document, and post a link to it in forums or on your game's new website! It even saves backups of all revisions made to the document so if you want to revert to a previous version, you can!

Here's another scenario. You're game's team has someone assigned as a story or script writer. You want to be able to see the progress this person has made at any time and be able to revise their work to fix spelling and other issues. Google Docs allows you to create a document and invite collaborators (like your script writer and/or other members of your team) into the document, and you can all edit the now shared document. Additionally, there's no hassle in acquiring the finished product, as it's already in your Google Documents. You can even upload images and screenshots directly into a Google Document (it's recommended if you just want to host the file, you should probably use the file uploader inside Google Page Creator)

How about this one? You're writing an RGSS script, but something about it isn't working. You can save the code as a Google Document, and then either collaborate with other members of your team (if any) or you can publish the document, post about it here on the forum, and if anyone knows what's wrong you can invite them individually as collaborators so if necessary they can edit the code themselves instead of copying all the code with the necessary changes into a forum reply.

Collaboration is key!

Blogger

Why would you need a blog for your project? In addition to the fact that blogs are extremely effective at drawing traffic to a website, a blog would be useful for your project because you can instantly inform the world of any and all progress you've made. Additionally, most blogs (including Blogger) syndicate your blog to an RSS news feed which can be subscribed to by anyone and they will be automatically notified of any updates to the blog. Likewise, using a blog will allow you to automatically notify everyone whenever you update your game. This means you don't have to waste any time going around to a bunch of forums to bump them with update info if you don't want to. Additionally, Google Docs has an option to post a document directly to Blogger. (so you don't even have to use Blogger's post editor if you would prefer to use Google's)

Other Google Services that might improve your project's productivity include:

• Google Apps - Use this if you have $10 and want your game to have its own domain plus a couple of other neat perks.
• Google Calendar - If all your teammates have Google Accounts, you can share calendars, which will allow you to arrange conferences, set deadlines for eachother, and other beneficial effects.

Google is an RPG Maker's Best Friend!