Hello, everyone! As I told everyone at the MIGS 2009 “How To Love Outsourcing” speech, here are the slides:
Sorry it took me until later today to post them. We were stranded in the Montreal airport for awhile yesterday and didn’t get back to Austin until really late, and I’m still dead tired.
Thanks to everyone that attended!
Artists: Getting paid is important. If it’s a small studio, they simply may forget to mail off a check in a timely manner. That sucks. It’s usually not intentional. They got the art, which is all they wanted, so they’ve probably moved onto working on something else and aren’t thinking about it anymore.
One way you can counteract this is by setting an expectation as early as possible about when you’ll receive payment after submitting an invoice. If they don’t have a date in their head that you need to expect to be paid by, it’s more likely to slip their mind.
See, if you’re working with inexperienced clients, having a set of expectations you can subtly impress upon them can help give them cues on how to think and act. Here’s an example:
You: “Hey, when I submit my first invoice, what’s a reasonable timeframe to expect the check to be sent to me?”
Them: “Oh. A week or so after the invoice, probably.”
And when you submit the invoice, reiterate it:
“Okay, here’s my invoice. Based on our initial conversation about turnaround time on an invoice, you said to expect about 7 days. Is it reasonable to expect a check on or around [specific date]?”
Everybody trains everybody in their own way. 🙂 If you make your expectations clear and are polite and respectful about it, you’ll make sure your business gets taken care of and they learn how to deal with people more effectively and respectfully.
Managers: One additional way to treat your artists well is to tell them in advance exactly when they’ll get paid after invoicing you, and remind them again when they invoice. Setting and meeting expectations is good business. 🙂
I’ve been doing some thinking and experimenting with the way I structure contractor feedback and I have some slight tweaks I’d like to share. Here’s my new template:
[Absolute asset name] ([Iterative asset filename)]) – [Positive Feedback]
[Referencepaintover image filename]
– [Locational callout] – [Feedback]
Instead of using absolute asset names, I’ve been using the filename of the submitted asset. It’s been fine for tracking individual submitted asset names, but it doesn’t work well if they vary slightly from the asset’s true name. From now on I’m going to give each asset a rigid asset name, and then reference in parenthesis the name of the submitted file, AKA the iterative asset filename.
Example:
Mutant_Cave_Dweller (Mutant_Cave_Dweller_wip_05.jpg)
Furthermore, anytime I include a reference image, I’m going to call it out immediately below the absolute asset name and the iterative asset filename. Below that goes the feedback.
Example:
Mutant_Cave_Dweller (Mutant_Cave_Dweller_wip_05.jpg) – This looks great! I dig the gnarled knuckles and callouses on his hands.
– REFERENCE: Mutant_Cave_Dweller_leg_paintover.jpg
– LEG: Refer to Mutant_Cave_DWeller_leg_paintover.jpg to see the changes I made to the leg. Specifically…
This’ll make it easier to search through my feedback text files for the history of a single asset. Granted, I’d much rather have a centralized asset database that I can track all these through, because what I am doing could be streamlined further with a system like that. I’m still figuring out the best way to handle that on my own. For the scale of production I’m dealing with, though, I tend to avoid solutions that are more complex than the problem at hand. It’s easy to forget all the additional overhead required for the compliance with and maintenance of that system. 🙂
Thoughts, anyone?
This is a followup to my Project: Outsource Everything post, nearly a year later.
To be frank, almost everything I planned to do succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. 🙂 Not without a few hitches and problems from which I learned much, but on the whole, my crazy notions were a complete success. It’s actually silly how well they’re going now. I’ll go through them point by point:
Armor Set Integration. I handed this off to the artist I had create my Creature Trees and he stepped up to the plate and started cranking all of these out and making them work in the game. An artist I had internally would check over and critique his work and make sure everything went smoothly. I did have a few problems with the way I priced all of this out, though.
For complex operations like this, a per-asset rate is really a liability for the contractor, both for the time it takes on his end to test and iterate, but also for the time on our end to verify everything worked. In the contractor’s haste to get paid, a lot of problems cropped up he’d have noticed if he’d been paid for his time, so we ended up having a LOT of iteration passes (3 – 6 per set sometimes, and I prefer having a hard limit of 2 iterations per asset if I can help it) and built a backlog of 90% complete armor sets that were a pain in the ass to test and finish off.
I solved this by moving him over to a flat daily rate where he actually took the time to really dig into the armor sets, fix a lot of problems he wouldn’t have before because he was in a hurry to get paid (no telling if a set would take a day or two weeks to final), and the number of iteration passes is getting lower and lower and we’ve finally hit a nice groove with it.
Give them Perforce Find a dedicated bugfixer. I have one contractor (the same guy as above) hooked into Perforce now, as well as our internal bug database. The first thing I gave him to do was work through the project’s entire backlog of art bugs and paid him a flat daily rate to do it. This guy is uniquely motivated to crank out as much stuff as possible and be hyperproductive at all times, so this was perfect personality fit. He fixed virtually every outstanding bug we’d ever had in about three weeks, and checked everything right into Perforce with minimal issues.
Additionally, I gave him his own account in the bug database and started encouraging the team to start noticing all the outstanding little art glitches and bugs they’d normally filter out and ignore and to assign them to this guy. After awhile, you get used to seeing something ugly or broken, and you don’t even bother mentioning it because you know it’ll never be fixed. That is no longer the case because We Have A Guy For That. 🙂
All the low-priority bugs (small clipping issues, etc) he would fix and check in without checking with me. All the medium and high priority bugs I went through and explained the solutions to and told him to reassign them to me to check his work before committing all the changes. This has worked out extremely well. Pricing this out per day was also crucial in making it economical and efficient.
It was a nice little morale boost for the team to see things that were broken forever suddenly start working properly. Whenever possible, I seek high-value, high-visibility, morale-building tasks that’ll make the team feel like everything’s moving forward. A lot of my job is invisible to them in terms of management, organization, structure, etc, so it’s good for them and me when I can come in and show them concretely that their needs are being met and that Cool Stuff Happens.
(man, I still can’t believe I outsourced bugfixing. 🙂
Ramping up dedicated world-builders. I finally have a studio starting work on our environment art content with a clear path ahead to start expanding the scope of the assets they work on as they familiarize themselves with our terrain system. Woot!
Drop in world integrators. We hired a technical artist inhouse that’s handling this, actually, so that’s been delegated fully. He’s going to be looped into the feedback forums we’re setting up with the dedicated world-builders to help see everything through to completion.
The only thing I didn’t do was find a standards enforcer, which is really quite ambitious and has horrifying, far-reaching implications that I don’t want to mess with since we’re a live game. Maybe if he was inhouse I’d think about it, but that’s such a Herculean task that can make everything blow up that I’m abandoning that idea entirely.
You know, it was pretty cool to go back, read that post, and find out everything I did totally, completely, fully worked. Quite a nice confidence-booster. 🙂 I have a few ideas for what’s next, and I’ll formulate those into a post soon!
Do any of you have questions about any of these things I’ve done? I’m happy to share all the knowledge I can, especially if I can go into any more detail on mistakes I’ve made and what I learned from them. Yay knowledge!
I’m on a major feedback-writing pass this week and I had seven feedback maxims I’d like to share:
These tips will make all your feedback ridiculously easy to search through and refer to anytime you need, ever. It DEFINITELY pays to be smArt and organized. Leave nothing to chance and let absolutely NOTHING slip outside of the organizational systems you create! A system is only as effective as one’s continued adherence to it. Making even ONE exception defeats the system’s purpose. From there, it’s a slippery slope, and the system falls apart.
If I’d known these tips going into this job I’d have saved myself countless hours of pain and struggle. 🙂 I’m wincing to imagine the HOURS I’ve spent trying to find “that one email where I’m SURE I asked you to…”
Agh, sorry for my slowness to respond to comments lately… I’ve been crunching on something big ever since GDC. I only have time for a short post relating to a thought I had tonight. I’ll expand a bit on my “Outsourcing Concept Art smArtly” article…
I’ve found an approach working with one of my outsourcing partners that I’ve liked. When putting together the thumbnail color roughs, something I love to see is a layered PSD file with different layer groups showing alternate color schemes that let me mix and match.
For example, if it’s a character, I can toggle between Red, Black, and Blue color schemes for the Helmet, Chest Piece and Boots. All are individually toggleable. With the varied layers that I can toggle on and off at will, I can mix and match them as I like, fiddle with my layer settings, then pick out the colors I like. Let’s say I choose Red Helmet, Black Chest Piece and Black Boots.
Leaving only those layers visible, I can lock down those colors I prefer, save out that PSD as a layered example for them to use. 🙂 They can lift the exact colors and settings I want from the layered PSD instead of second-guessing.
One additional VERY useful tip that I learned from a mistake is to ALSO save out a JPG from that, and deliver BOTH to them. Why? To make sure no one accidentally unhides the wrong layer and delivers the wrong color version to me later. So they have the layered AND flattened reference to ensure everything is solid.
I’m quite happy with this arrangement so far, and will be using it again moving forward. 🙂
Hope that helps you crazy smArt managers out there! And smArtists that are paying attention…
One really interesting trend I’ve found in the last couple years is that artists are *far* more motivated to keep working if their contracts are structured so they get paid bi-weekly. The “big fat contract” high wears off after a week or two on average, and productivity goes SHARPLY down after that.
But, if I make sure they get paid every couple weeks by changing how the payment invoice schedule works, they stay happier and more productive longer. Having some semblance of a normal schedule and normal-seeming payment schedule has surprising productivity benefits.
One week is too frequent (who wants to split up work that finely and invoice that often, anyway?), three weeks is too long (productivity falls after week two ends), and two weeks really seems to be the sweet spot.
I’ve noticed this trend enough times and in enough artists and studios that I finally paid heed. I try *VERY* hard to make sure the blocks of work I give my artists last roughly two weeks to keep things moving smoothly.
Artists, take note and push for this if you can. You’ll be happier and more motivated.
Art managers, this is something definitely worth considering and experimenting with.
Anyone have any thoughts on that? 🙂
I made a forum post this week on what information I provide to the studios I outsource my animation work to, and I thought I’d repost it here.
The speccing process for animation work needs to be detailed and thorough, as does as the reference. However, most of this work only needs doing once, and the rest is easily templatable. If you have a basic list of animations per character or creature type to start with, outsourcing animation can be a surprisingly simple process once the rest of the groundwork is laid.
This is everything I provide my animators:
On all my feedback to them, I provide extremely specific information on which limb or bone I want to do what, on which frame, for how many frames, and the style in which it should move. For extra information, I offer screengrabs of what’s wrong (if anything), and offer AVI or MAX file source art reference when available. I generally have 1 to 2 iteration passes per individual animation, which is pretty badass. 🙂
One of the real value-adds I’ve found in assembling all this information is that most of it can be classified easily and packaged into a generic “Monster Animation Kit” or “Player Character Animation Kit” complete with references, tech specs, etc. The only specific information that needs to be transmitted with each asset is the backstory and movement style. In other words… I really only gather *all* that information once. It’s far less daunting than it sounds. 😉
To the managers and artists out there — is there any other relevant information you can think of that would be useful to provide in this packet?
Based on the last ~15 months of contracting out concept art, I’ve
refined my style a bit and just made a dramatic change in the way I
parcel out work.
I used to price out concept art per piece. Everything from initial
roughs to polish to ink to color to turnarounds was a single asset at
a single price.
I noticed a tendency, though — the artists, in their desire to get
paid sooner rather than later, would rush through the initial roughs
too quickly and try to finish each piece of art as fast as they could.
That’s totally natural and to be expected, since I’m not paying them
for their time, but for the finished result. But I felt like I was
losing out on a lot of potential ideas. So I asked myself, how can I
get the most out of the initial idea-generation process?
Then it came to me. It’s simple: Break it into two phases: Rough Phase
and Polish Phase.
The initial Rough Phase can include a pre-set number of sheets of
rough ideas and some basic pencil tightening and ink, but no color. I
spend a reasonable amount of money and time on this phase, and I make
the Rough Phase its own end, instead of an annoying stepping stone to
a finished piece. I get a wide variety of ideas, then determine which
rough concepts to move forward with and polish. The roughs get done,
and they get paid.
The next and final phase, the Polish Phase, is where I take the ideas
I selected in the Rough Phase and finish them off. I get color
thumbnails (to experiment with a wide variety of potential color
schemes), final coloring, the turnarounds and the inevitable last
minute spit-shine.
Voila, you have a finished concept! You get the full benefit of the
rough idea phase where you can bounce around ideas all you want
without the “finish the entire concept” pressure, and then once that’s
wrapped, you approve it and pay him.
And to the artist, he basically gets paid two times for one concept.
AND his earning potential increases!
Wait, what? How does his earning potential increase?
If you’re anything like me, the wide variety of ideas he generated in
the Rough Phase will find their way into two to four brand new
concepts that wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been broken up into
two phases. YOU get more ideas, HE gets more work. Not just that, but
since you priced each phase out differently, you can very quickly and
effectively amend the contract to add more Polish Phases at the
pre-agreed price terms! No more time spent negotiating. Get that all
done up-front!
Could it get any better?
…no, seriously. If there’s a better way than this, I want to know
about it so I can scrap this and DO it! 🙂
If you get to be a manager of external artists of any kind, MAKE A NEW ACCOUNT FOR INSTANT MESSAGING that only your contractors have access to. No friends.
I’m trying to separate work and home life more now and this was a critical mistake I made early on. Now I can’t work without friends poking me, and I can’t be at home online without being pestered about work. It’s frustrating. Too much connectivity can definitely be a curse.
My next steps are to create new accounts solely for work that my friends don’t know about, then migrate all my contractors over to those accounts and block them from my old ones.
It seems so obvious in retrospect. 😛