I’ve been trying to come up with a simpler and easier way to structure my feedback on assets I receive that makes it easier for the contractor to focus on one aspect at a time, without being dependent on anything but plain text.

Most of my job is communicating ideas. And there are so many different ways to go about it that even the specific structure of the way you speak to someone can make the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong.

See, it’s easy to get lost in a lengthy changelist, or accidentally overlook a problem, or simply not know what I’m asking. It’s put a lot of pressure on me to learn how to communicate the most with the fewest words, and to arrange the data in such a way that certain parts of the feedback will pop out at them and really stick in their head.

In the example below, I’ve adopted a very specific, consistent structure for presenting feedback on art assets to my contractors. The human brain is a fascinating machine, and learning how to make the most out of the words I speak so they’ll get maximum impact in the mind I’m dealing with is a really fun challenge!

As an experiment I’ve briefly strayed from my numbered bullet points idea. Right now, this is my formula:

Orok_Chieftain_Run_Animation_01 – Awesome! Great sense of weight.
– CHEST: Some vertices on his chest poke into his body. Can you fix the rig?
– FEET: His feet dip below the floor in frames 14-17 and 28-31. Can you bring them up?

In other words…

[Asset_Name] – [Brief Praise]
– [SPECIFIC LOCATION]: [Brief description of problem. Ask for specific fix?]

My reasoning is as follows:

• [Asset_Name] – Obviously you’re going to want to specify which asset you’re commenting on.
• [Brief Praise] – I generally try to say something nice and positive about everything I get. I never put anything negative here. If I have nothing good to say, I leave it blank. But I always start out with praise. Studio or contractor, I feel like this matters.
• [SPECIFIC LOCATION] – This is the REALLY important part. An endless bullet list, even numbered, can be a bit much to look at. But if you can have an IMMEDIATE callout of the specific area that’s affected by the problem, it’ll be easier to go through the list of changes component by component. “Okay, chest, foot, leg.” When questioned, it’s a little easier to refer to areas specific to the asset itself instead of an arbitrary number that forces them to go back and look at the feedback list and remember what ‘3’ corresponded to. Granted, yeah, they should always have that available, but I have to look, too. 🙂 Every bit of time savings I can squeeze out of something, I will.
• [Brief description of problem. Ask for specific fix?] – The reason I describe it and end with a period, then ask the question, is because a question mark stands out in a sentence. They read the problem, and the proposed solution jumps out at them more readily than would a sea of periods. It also forces me to parse my thoughts very simply and clearly, which helps me. That, and I prefer coming off slightly nicer by asking a question instead of stating a list of demands. Sure, I’m paying them and I could be brusque if I want, but I personally prefer the softer touch unless I’m straightening someone out.

What do you guys think? I’m really curious to hear from artists what helps them keep track of changes better. And also from any managers that may have techniques of their own. 🙂

I’m in a unique position in my job where I have a modest budget to spend on outsourcing art for my game. I have complete control over where, how and when I spend it. I have to jointly art direct, manage the game’s art, manage my artists, critique and approve or disapprove their work, handle budgeting, scheduling, and every other tiny little aspect of art including documentation, asset integration, bugfixing, and little super-tiny tweaks to polish each individual asset I receive. And I’m managing 25 to 30 artists right now — by myself — that puts a huge burden on me. But why should I take all of that on myself? I shouldn’t.

I think something I’ve failed to consider until the past month or so is… I’ve been limiting my scope. I’m thinking more in terms of outsourcing assets, instead of outsourcing processes that create assets.

Why draw the line at pure art asset creation? Why not outsource integration, or organizational work, or the small snippets of fiction I need for outsourcing creatures and their animations? Why not simply outsource an art lieutenant to handle sub-management tasks? Hire a small firm — or a single guy — to handle all my marketing materials? I get to spend my budget however I please, because my boss trusts me with it. Wouldn’t this be a smArter way to run a project in my situation?

I’ve been learning this whole time how to be the mind that controls the hands. Why draw overly strict lines at what I will or won’t let hands do? I don’t have time to do everything that I need to do and I take way too much on myself. I need to open up and be willing to start outsourcing smaller tasks. No one says I can’t do it. I certainly have the power. Why not use it?

So I realized that I could, and SHOULD, outsource more than just basic art. I can outsource the entire processes that create them. At this point, I understand the whole project inside and out, and how to communicate the specifications of any kind of work that I would need someone to do. It just never occurred to me to look for dedicated asset integrators, or people to handle the other various tasks I take on myself that aren’t as easily classifiable. I know how to spec out work, send it to an external contractor, communicate with him clearly and get exactly what I want in a reasonable timeframe. I should leverage that and expand the scope of what I outsource.

Not many people are in a position like I’m in. I may as well make the most of it, have fun and do what others won’t. 🙂

It’s still early, but so far I’ve been contracting out a lot of organizational work and full soup-to-nuts asset integration to various studios and people that have been doing an incredible job so far. It’s moderately technical work, and I’ve had to spend a lot of time training them and getting them up to speed, but it’s starting to smooth out and the results have been great. So far I’ve:

• Character and Creature Trees remade. Had my Character Tree completely redone by an artist with a background in print. He rearranged everything, set up smart and logical layering system in Photoshop to ease updating it, made it completely print-friendly and made it ten times easier and faster to work with. Then I had him recreate my Creature Tree with the exact same format.
  
• Weapons Tree made. Had the same artist create a Weapons Tree from scratch, which involved rendering out every single weapon in the entire game and organizing it into a PSD the same way the Character and Creature Trees were made.
  
• Ramped up dedicated asset integrators. Set up a small studio with a developer’s build of the game, got it running (which is massively difficult), and I’m sending them work now to get started learning how to integrate assets into the game from start to finish, so they can send me assets that work 100%.
  
• Outsourced particle effects work. Got a team of Korean artists up and running with our proprietary particle editor. I had to record several tutorial videos, write a lot of documentation, record sample videos of our existing particle effects, hire a particle effects concept artists to render out the effects in Photoshop, and do a lot of careful back and forth. Now they’re churning out incredible particle effects at a rate and level of quality I wouldn’t have imagined possible. I seem to be the only person that’s outsourcing particle effects like this, because I have’nt been able to find anyone else that’s been crazy enough to try it. 🙂
  
• Made Marketing happy. I hired an artist to make marketing renders of every art asset in the entire game, so I never have to do any rush jobs for marketing.
  
• Hired a polishing artist. I had an artist to go over every icon file we have in the game and give it a coat of polish to bring them all up to a more consistent level of quality.

And that’s just a start! My future plans include:

• Armor set integration. I want to hand over full character armor sets for complete integration and bugfixing by an external artist. This is BY FAR the most technically demanding aspect of this project’s art production, and if I can do this successfully, then by god, I can do anything.
• Give them Perforce. I love the idea of giving a small group of dedicated asset integrators Perforce access to a special branch of the project that I have control over. Then they can submit their changelists, and I can selectively integrate those changelists to the main branch instead of having to do every tiny little thing myself.
• Ramping up some dedicated world-builders. I want to set up one studio to churn out absolutely nothing but new environmental art content, and do it in such a way that each subsequent asset teaches them another requisite skill for working with our engine’s technical constraints.
• Find a dedicated bugfixer. Once I get my asset integration studios fully ramped up and working with us, I’m going to send the more technical bug fixes that pop up to them to take care of.
• Find a standards enforcer. I like the idea of getting someone to go through and rename huge swaths of project files and update all the scripts to reflect the proper file naming conventions, and to propose to me new ways of building onto those standards and maintaining them.
• Drop in world integrators. Once I get the world-builders set up, I want another team to hand that off to that’ll take that finished art and handle all the scripting, integration, testing and intensive bugfixing work. That way, they’ll hand me perfect, finished product.

  (IMPORTANT NOTE: The reason I want them to be separate from the world-builders is that I don’t want the world builders to *ever* get bogged down with the super technical bug fixing work. They should make game-ready assets to hand off that people who do nothing but make those assets work at any cost. The integrators will propose guidelines changes to me to send back to the world builders and improve the workflow.)

Who says you can’t outsource this shit?! 🙂

Over time, I think half of this whole workload will simply disappear from my plate and I won’t have to worry about everything as much. Which will be nice, because I could use a relief from my generally high levels of stress.

It’s going to be an interesting few months. My ultimate goal is to be doing nothing but management and direction, and have people and teams in place to handle everything below that. It’s going to be tricky, but my job wouldn’t be much fun if it wasn’t, now, would it?

Here’s to thinking out loud!

I’ve decided that I need to have a clean and clear concept art repository. As it is, everything is really spread out and too dependent on me remembering where random crap is instead of actually being intuitive. My motto: If it only exists inside your head, it’s worthless.

So where do I begin? Continue reading Learning In Progress #9: Concept Art Repository →

Here’s a simple lesson I’ve learned: If you’re going to change the file naming conventions on your game, start doing it right immediately and make no exceptions.

Sounds simple, but we have a lot of legacy assets we inherited that have naming conventions we’ve chosen to change. We also have some assets we made ourselves that have naming conventions that eventually proved to be a bit crap. Finally, we decided on a naming convention, but now we have the really old stuff we inherited, the older stuff we did ourselves, and the new assets we’re making now. That’s three different conflicting conventions. Cool.

I would go back and rename everything, but those are extremely deep and interconnected changes that touch hundreds of files. If any one of those is inconsistent, everything will come crashing down. All I can do is patch the problem.

So, if I’m doing any kind of modification on older assets, which naming convention do I stick to?

There were two things I could do:

1. Stick to the old naming convention for that particular asset, so it’ll still make sense in context with itself.
2. Use the new naming convention, even though it makes the new modified asset stand out and make less sense.

Ultimately, I decided that the smartest and best thing to do would be to stick to the NEW naming convention. Start doing it right IMMEDIATELY.

Fine, it’ll stand out and it won’t make sense in the context of the old named asset, but every NEW asset I make will bring things closer to a unified whole. Every little bit I can do matters, and the earlier I be decisive the fewer the problems I’ll have to deal with later. Less to rename later, right? It’ll be harder to deal with now but this decision will pay off later.

I’m surprised I waffled on that earlier considering how simple this decision seems to be, but everything is always different when you’re actually inside the situation and have a clear view of what’s going on. 🙂