I want to develop a game and am considering collaborating with others, potentially even making it open-source.
To make this process smoother, I need to establish an easy-to-replicate development environment—one that can be set up by non-programmers (such as artists) but is also simple for me to configure so I can focus on actual development.
I’ve explored various options (Docker, Podman, Anaconda, NixOS, VMs), but the choices are overwhelming, and I’m unsure which one is best for my needs.
I’ve had partial success with a Fedora+i3wm virtual environment (VM), creating a plug-and-play experience. However, this setup requires extra space (~3GB for the OS) and includes software already installed on the host system. It also requires users to learn i3wm and possibly use the command line, which may not be ideal for everyone.
I would appreciate any advice on how to approach this effectively.
Edit: An example of things to setup:
- The right .Net Sdks version
- Git
- Git LFS
- Format Checks
- VScode (+ extensions)
- Godot (+ extensions)
Final: I have read your recommendations, researched your suggestions, and looked at what other projects use (Luanti uses docker). And I have finally decided that at least for now this might be a bit overboard. I will start with a simple setup script and setup files (such as for vscode) with instructions. And if I need to in the future I will most likely use Docker.
Artists will probably have their own setup, software and workflow that they are comfortable with. I’d recommend letting them use their own workflow, and just discussing the interface, so to speak: what file format(s) to use and such. I think GLTF is used for assets, but I’m definitely not an expert.
As for other devs, most required tooling (e.g. Unity or Pycharm or whatever) are one-time installs that you can list somewhere. And language libraries/dependencies are a solved problem (e.g. pipenv, cargo, yarn).
But if you really want to set this up, nix (or lix) is probably your best bet for a total devenv that is exactly reproducible, assuming that works for WSL (or no one uses windows).
Otherwise docker/podman or devenv will probably be doable as well.