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:

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:

1. Make subject lines COUNT. Be as descriptive and meaningful as possible, especially when dealing with contracts. Use special easily searchable key words like “ArtStudio signed contract AS-0004” or “(2008-05-15) Feedback for Fat Stinky Orok.”
2. Everything MUST create its own context. Act as if the feedback you’re writing is the only feedback you’ve ever written to them. Never create dependencies on past feedback! If you need to, re-paste relevant feedback from a previous email. Be specific, and don’t say “do it like that one time” when you could say “In the 2008-05-12 feedback revision when I asked you to adjust the size of the legs.”
3. Official feedback comes from one place ONLY. I’ll answer very basic work-in-progress questions in an instant messaging app, but for me, OFFICIAL feedback is only for email. Feedback comes from only ONE place! This establishes a consistent approach with the artists, gives you a paper trail, minimizes your contact points and gives everyone only ONE place to search.
4. Save feedback to its OWN directory. I have a directory for each individual contractor I work with. It’s divided chronologically by their asset deliveries and my reference and feedback drops. Every piece of feedback I ever send them gets saved into a text file and dropped into the appropriate dated directories. This makes it blazingly easy to refer to whenever I need it.
5. Save ALL work-related instant messaging chat logs. If a casual IM conversation turns into something work-related, save all the relevant bits from that log into the same feedback directory. Every piece of correspondence is important, especially for potential legal issues that may arise in the future. Keep everything in one place!
6. NEVER include a hyperlink to an image. The site can go down. Always save it, name it meaningfully and attach it in the email, forum post or FTP drop.
7. ALWAYS specify filenames. In the feedback, never say “check the attached image” without giving the image’s exact filename! This will aid searching later. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through old feedback and seen that and thought “WHAT IMAGE?!?” and had to search through old emails.

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:

• All the source MAX files for other creatures of that class and race for comparison.
• A specific document for each individual creature I’m having animated. It contains the following:
1. A two-paragraph description of the character’s backstory, attitude and movement style, referenced against his racial traits.
2. A description of his preferred idle state, walk and run movement, and attack style.
3. A detailed list of every animation, description of which hands and feet do what, what default position it needs to revert to, the exact number of frames required per sequence, a copy-pasteable copy of the animation scripting needed in MAX, naming convention guidelines, and all other technical specifications and style descriptions.
4. Specific instructions (where applicable) of what needs to happen on specific frames to match ingame timing.
5. An explicitly detailed list of technical constraints and guidelines.
6. Any immediate references I can make (“similar to X creature’s attack or movements”)

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. 😛

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?