Beginner host- Best way for a new team to collaborate?

We're a small group of complete beginners, some with some existing blender skills. Learning as much unity this week as we can before the weekend. (We're working through the free Wireframe Build Your Own FPS (https://store.rpipress.cc/products/build-your-own-first-person-shooter-in-unity). Our goal is to have fun, and see what we can do. We're already thinking that we'll be using the "Casual" option ;-). Secondary goal is to start a local, in-person community for future jam events.

So ticking off the basics, got Unity and tools installed in our lab, and then started looking into options for collaboration between contributors.

We may 5+ contributors, so Unity's free builtin cloud tools don't fit. Looks like git + git lfs are our best bet.

All the free git hosts have some more complex file size limits with LFS (understandable), and I'm concerned that those who've never used revision control might "commit-spam" and blow through the free bandwidth limits pretty fast.

Right now I'm thinking this will be the best/easiest thing for us:

  • a local installation of gitea with LFS enabled
  • a pre-created repo with appropriate git dot config files for ignores, LFS file types, etc
  • check in a new/empty Unity project with it configured for visible meta files, and other options enabled to make Unity more version control friendly
  • have everyone check out the new clean rep and start from there
  • where-ever possible, have people work together on one PC (we're hosting this live), partly with the goal to reduce the number of individual checkins
  • keep a list of active files and whose working on them on the whiteboard (why merge when you can avoid it by talking ;-) )
  • at the end, make a new repo on github and checkin a history-less version of the final submission- so we shouldn't hit any of the GitHub data caps

Does this sound reasonable? Setting up Gitea/linux/sys-op/dev-op stuff I'm ok with- just have ~zero Unity experience.

Or do we all just load the project from the same directory on a file server? I'm adverse to even try this given past experiences... but that was quite a few years ago, and maybe the tools magically work, and lock files properly, make it easy to clean up locks after crashes- ie it just works?!

Another plus for gitea is that it shouldn't be too hard to add Jenkins CI + install Unity for Linux in the future, for later jams.

Does this sound reasonable?

Any other recommendations or suggestions?

Thanks!