I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and a fair amount of work lately building perfect modular kits for my contractors so they can get started quicker and have to ask fewer questions.

The idea is that I’d like to have one single ZIP file that contains everything a new contractor needs to get started on his asset type.

So that leads to the question — what does a contractor need to be able to do his job? That’s a big list, so let’s give an example. If I were to hire a new animator, this is the type of data I would put in a contractor kit for him:

• Technical specifications. For each asset type in my game, there is a guidelines document with detailed technical specifications. For animators, I made another post called On Contracting Animators that has a good list.
• List of animations. There’s a complete list of animations for characters, creatures and other animatable objects that I store in another, separate document. I break down each type of asset into characters, creatures, animated objects, and miscellaneous. From there, I break each down into structured lists divided by their role in the game. For example, creatures are either Melee (hand-to-hand combat), Ranged (attack with guns or bows), and Caster (magic user). Each role has a unique animation set, so I list all the animations in each set. This is especially useful for when I want to create a new creature, before I even outsource it I can say “Okay, Fat Ogre 3 is going to use the Melee and Ranged Animation Sets.” I don’t have to decide which animations it has one by one every time I want a new creature, because I already figured it out beforehand. Then when I send the list of animations to the animator, I can simply copy and paste those pre-made animation lists. Time savings ahoy!
• The exporter. I include a copy of our proprietary 3DSMAX exporter plugin, along with simple installation and usage instructions.
• The tool. I include a copy of our proprietary Model Editor, along with simple usage instructions so the animator can create usable assets for our engine. Why should I have to?
• Animation samples. I have directories set aside that offer example animations of every sequence for each type of creature and animatable object. There’s a directory for the Melee Animation Set that has sample animations for every sequence in that set, and so on for everything else that needs an example. I *never* leave gaps in reference for things like this.
• Style guides. I include the style guides relevant to the race of creature he’ll be animating, so he can see the other members of that race, their size in relation to each other, and get a sense of their attitude.
• Scale guide. I have a MAX file demonstrating the scale of the object in the world so the animator can get a better sense of scale and how to animate what it is I’m giving him.
• FAQ. I’ve assembled a brief FAQ full of common questions I’ve been asked by my contractors. One very important note I’d like to make about the FAQ: It was a huge breakthrough to me to realize that every time I talk to one of my contractors to explain something or answer a question, I’m generating documentation. Everything I say is usable. So I just remember to write it down in one document, organize it, give it a coat of spit-shine, and my project is better-documented. Documentation doesn’t have to be a big ugly mess that I have to sit down for hours and do… it can be incremental. (why answer the same question more than once?)

I have all these files set aside in a special ‘contractor kits’ directory under another subdirectory specific to them. For example in C:workcontractor_kits you would find Character_Art_Production_Kit, Animation_Production_Kit, Environment_Art_Production_Kit, etc. Zipped copies exist in each of these directories so any time I have a new hire, I simply copy and paste the ZIP and that’s everything they’ll need to know, in detail.

This is an awful lot of preparation and organizational work, but considering my circumstances (straddling art directorart managerproducerartist roles simultaneously) it saves me a LOT of time. Or, it will, once I finish putting all of them together.

To the contract smArtists out there — what kind of information and resources do you wish YOU had from your clients?

I’ve noticed in the past that when I send back a list of requested changes to my contractors, if there’s more than one change, sometimes they’ll forget one or two. It’s a simple mistake, because I’m often trying to transmit a lot of information, and some of it can just slip their mind.

I quickly stopped writing entire paragraphs containing several changes, and boiled them down to individual bullet points. But still, sometimes a bullet point would be forgotten, and the problem still wasn’t entirely solved. So to combat the changes falling through the cracks, I’ve discovered a useful tip that seems to work best: Numbered Bullet Points.

Bullet points themselves are a useful way of dividing large ideas into several smaller ones that are easier to communicate and understand. But bullet points alone aren’t enough. By using numbered bullet points, you assign a VALUE to each bullet point, and it reads more like a step-by-step list with concepts that can be quickly referred to by their number value.

“I see you completed changes 1 and 3, but not 2?”

More than half of my job is learning how to organize and distill information into small, easily understandable, meaningful bites that create their own context. Numbered bullet points are one of the many tools in my arsenal. You’ll notice I often even use them in my writing…

The project I’m on is a small-scale MMORPG. As is typical in this type of game, your character is always on the hunt for newer, better pieces of armor. That requires a significant investment in creating new art assets for these armor pieces. There has to be a lot of them, they have to be varied, and they have to look cool. They also have to visually represent different levels of quality. i.e., common armor, special magic armor, and super rare awesome hard-to-find mythic armor.

The problem is — how do you keep track of that many assets? How can I show them off and make sure the visual progression makes sense and that each fits the game’s art style and color palette?

I struggled with that for awhile and one of NCsoft’s head art people worldwide showed me the character tree. It’s a giant table full of characters, each character occupying a single cell of the table. Here’s a mockup very similar to what I use:

Horizontally, the tree is divided into sections by the player’s class: Mage Armor, Ranger Armor, and Fighter Armor. Underneath that are class-specific armor types. i.e., Light Cloth and Heavy Cloth for the Mage, Light Leather and Heavy Leather for the Ranger, etc.

Vertically, it’s divided by the quality level of the armor: Normal Armor, Unique Armor and Mythic Armor. The lower you go on the list, the higher the quality the armor is.

It’s further divided up into yellow and blue cells. The yellow cells indicate an armor set that’s complete. The blue cell indicates an armor set that’s still in production and not yet complete.

When I put the characters on the tree, I place them visually where I think they belong in terms of armor quality. If one piece of armor looks dramatically better than another, then I’ll move it further down the table and leave gaps in between them. Seeing those gaps shows me visually where the progression of low quality armor to high quality of armor breaks down. That way I can know where to start concepting a new armor set to fit in and maintain that logical progression.

I have a five foot by five foot printout of this character tree on my wall. I refer to it constantly, put Post-Its all over it to give me notes, and I have a special template that I can paste new armor sets onto, print out, and cut out to paste individually into cells instead of replacing entire sheets simply because I updated one asset.

The biggest benefit of this character tree is to be able to see at a glance how many armor pieces are in the game, how many are completed, and how many are still in production. I can see how the different pieces of armor relate to each other visually, I can see what the name of that asset is, and I can rearrange it easily.

Seeing the entire series of character armor sets in the game was tremendously valuable and has helped me plan art production more effectively and keep track of things like never before. Having it ALWAYS on my wall instead of in pure digital form has been vital. It’s also helped me realize some mistakes I made in other areas.

One of the initial mistakes I made on the project was choosing exactly which armor set was what quality at the outset of production, and naming it that way. i.e.:

Human Male – Mythic Leather Armor 2

All the filenames would reflect that:

Human Male – Mythic Leather Armor 2 Helm
Human Male – Mythic Leather Armor 2 Boots
Human Male – Mythic Leather Armor 2 Body
Human Male – Mythic Leather Armor 2 Shoulders
Human Male – Mythic Leather Armor 2 Gloves

But if I place that asset on the tree, and it looks more Unique than Mythic, and I decide to move it, I have to rename it. You can’t call a Unique piece of armor Mythic! It gets confusing, and creates two names where there was previously only one. In the game it may be Human Male – Unique Leather Armor 4, but all the data still points to files that refer to Human Male – Mythic Leather Armor 2. That requires renaming the MAX file, renaming all the textures, renaming all the materials, re-exporting the model, then going through all the multiple data files and renaming everything and testing to see if it all still works. It’s HUGE pain in the ass.

I didn’t realize it was a problem until I started moving characters around on the tree and they took on drastically different roles than they were originally intended, even though they were called something else using the same terminology. So, in the interest of flexibility, I started naming the armor sets generic names like Cloth 1, Leather 2, Plate 3, etc. That way, the designation of quality (Normal, Unique, Mythic) is totally stripped from it and it can be shifted around easily. The filenames are also shorter, take less time to type in and are less confusing overall.

I never would have realized that if I didn’t have a way of visualizing all our characters and quickly rearranging them! Once you put them all together, the difference is incredible.

Other things I have added or will soon add to the character tree is a text readout of how many characters there are, how many are finished, and how many are still in production, how many color variations exist, and so on. I’ll also have small color-coded tabs on each piece to show what color variations exist for that piece of armor. There’s no reason to waste 10 cells on a single character in red, blue, green, purple, etc, when I can show the normal version and have small color swatches tell me exactly that while taking up less space.

I also have a version of the character tree for creatures, which organizes them by race (Orok, Mutant, Fade, Whisker, etc) and role (Melee, Ranged, Caster and Boss). It makes coming up with new monsters incredibly easy when you see one race missing a mage, or a giant bruiser!

I’m also going to develop the same type of visual progression for all our weapons. These constructs have been immensely valuable to me in doing my job better, and I’m still refining them.

Does anyone else work with data like this? If so, what other types of meaningful information might I include on these trees to help me direct better?

Here’s a peek into what I do day to day and the things I’m learning, from broad concepts to specific ideas. I don’t know how informative it’ll be, but I’d like to document it anyway.

I currently lead a team of 11 remote contractors, down from a peak of 14. Sorting out the data they send me is starting to get pretty tricky. The way I’ve BEEN doing it is by organizing them with a directory structure like this:

Bob Contractor
– submission01 (unique male leather armor 1)
– changes (helm modification)
– submission02 (unique male leather armor 1 fixes)
– submission03 (unique female leather armor 1)

The ‘changes’ directory is where I modify the file myself, save it, and send it to the contractor. I put it in a separate directory so I can better sort through the files I save myself, and the files the contractor sends me.

The main problem with the way I’ve set it up is that I get SO many separate directories under each contractor. I’m up to ‘submission30’ for one of my artists, and the sheer amount of files is overwhelming. Files can get mixed up sometimes and it’s hard to tell what the latest version of something is.

An idea I’m toying with right now is custom naming every file with a date prefix and dumping it all into one large directory. So it’ll look more like this:

Bob Contractor
(01-19-2007) File 1.max
(01-19-2007) File 1.tga
(01-19-2007 JJ) File 1 changes.max
(01-20-2007) File 1 fixes.max

It’ll all be in one directory, sorted alphabetically AND by date because of the filenames I gave them. Files I’ve sent back for changes have the ‘JJ’ flag, because those are the initials of my name. When I approve an asset, I already have to resave and rename the files and move them to the project directory, so giving them different filenames here prevents me from accidentally assigning textures to the model outside of the project directory (which gets ugly in the game). It fits in pretty well with my existing workflow, while also giving me a quick at-a-glance view of every contractor’s assets and the last time I received a submitted asset from them.

All I have to do to maintain it is, when I receive an asset submission, add the date onto the filename as I save the file to my hard drive (which I already do anyway, so it’s not an extra step).

I don’t know if this is the best way to do things, but it’s the best idea I have right now and I’m moving forward with it until I get a better idea. Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome.

[UPDATE] I talked to some more people about it and the most stupidly obvious answer eluded me — set up an FTP account, give my artists some basic file naming convention directions, and let THEM do it. No more sorting through old assets, no needing to rename everything… just let THEM take care of it. Problem solved! Can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner, but I’m glad I asked around. [/UPDATE]