Photoshop has been around for 20 years now, and I found a really awesome timeline image showing the development of Photoshop over time, which key features were added in which versions, as well as a visual evolution of the Photoshop toolbox. Check it out!
50 tips, tweaks and hacks for Google Calendar!
Hi guys! I’m coming out of a post-Germany haze of sickness to link you to some handy tweaks for Google Calendar. I’m a total nut for Google Calendar and basically run my entire life through it now. Here’s the link:
50 tips, tweaks and hacks for Google Calendar!
My two favorites from the list are as follows:
16) Facebook Integration: If you’re a fan of the social networking program Facebook you’ll love this script. It allows you to easily transfer your Facebook events to your Google Calendar so you’ll never miss a get together.
25) Better GCal: This script combines several helpful scripts including skins, collapsed headers, secure connections, text wrap and more.
Enjoy!
100+ Resources for Video Game Professionals
Hey, neat! I was featured on a list of 100+ Resources for Video Game Professionals.
This looks to be a pretty solid list full of useful sites and really good people. I’m pretty flattered to be included in a list full of this much awesome!
I’m speaking at Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg Feb 10 – 12!
I’ve been invited to run a panel and speak at Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg, Germany Feb 10-12! The subject is managing external teams and outsourcing, and I’ve got some stellar panelists lined up to discuss it all with.
If you’re a game developer and you deal with art production and outsourcing, come on by and check us out! If you can’t make it, drop me a line and we can meet for beers somewhere after. :)
Germany, here I come!
Super-useful Firefox extension – App Tabs
Hello, world! I recent found a Firefox extension that’s helped me enormously in sorting out my tabs and keeping track of my most important ones. I would like to introduce you to App Tabs.
In a nutshell, this lets you turn a tab into a smaller, space-saving semi-permanent tab for tabs you always have open. See this:
For example, I always have Gmail, Google Voice and Google Calendar open. Ordinarily they take up a lot of real estate on my tab bar. I turned them into App Tabs with a simple right-click, and now they’re permanent fixtures on my tab bar without cluttering up the other tabs I have open.
It sounds like a pretty small feature, but it’s improved my Firefox experience dramatically. I’d suggest giving it a shot if you keep certain tabs open all the time and are sick of accidentally closing them. :)
Have fun!
FRAUDS! Defriend Grace Spander and Susan Alorin on Facebook.
They appear to be recruiters creating fake Facebook profiles posing as attractive, single women interested in men, and adding people from the game industry. The best guess so far is that they’re mining game developers’ profiles for information to take advantage of for the purposes of selling to game companies and for recruiting.
Myself and MANY other game developers (50+) have been approached by them. We’ve asked who they are and what they want and they don’t respond, and they’re adding absolutely ridiculous amounts of people all at once. They don’t show up on Google or MobyGames, no one I know has any idea who they are, and their only Facebook activity is adding game industry people I know to their friends list. VERY VERY suspicious.
Defriend them on Facebook and spread the word. This type of behavior shall not stand.
Tile Poker for the iPhone – support my indie game dev friends!
I am again pimping more indie game dev friends! Go check out Tile Poker for the iPhone, a clever, pretty and absurdly addictive game from Quiet Mime Studios. Only $1.99, less than coffee. Go support hard-working, worthy indie game developers! Here’s an iTunes link to download:
Google Browser Size – Great tool for portfolio design testing
This is extremely cool! Check out Google Browser Size.
Essentially, this web tool will draw an overlay map of your website marking the different resolution boundaries and showing you how likely people at different resolutions are to be able to see different parts of your website. Some people with low resolutions won’t scroll down to view the site. Here’s a quote from that page showing why this is important:
Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn’t see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it. 10% may not sound like a lot, but in this context it turns out to mean a significant number of people weren’t downloading Google Earth. Using this data, the team was able to redesign the page to good effect.
This would be a great tool for artists to check the usability of their website at different resolutions and to get ideas on how to tweak the design for better results. What if potential employers simply don’t see all of your art or scroll to view all the content? Google Browser Size could be a great tool for analyzing that. Go check it out!
Awesome business information tool: TweetDeck adds LinkedIn support!
This is awesome. TweetDeck, my favorite Twitter client, now added support for LinkedIn, my favorite business development networking tool! Now you can follow your connections’ activity feeds in realtime. Every time someone joins a company, updates their profile, answers a question, updates their status, etc, Tweetdeck updates to reflect the change and it makes it easier to get a sense of what’s going on day by day. I’ve actually spotted many layoffs and studio closures first through LinkedIn based on the type of activity that happens immediately before and after.
I’ll explain what TweetDeck is. It’s a full-featured, well-designed and easy to use Twitter client that has support for not only Twitter but also Facebook, MySpace and now LinkedIn as well. It provides a customizable multi-column view with many configuration options and special filters. You can customize which types of notices it shows you, such as Status, Q&A, Connections, Profile updates, Recommendations, Group joinings, and Application installs.
It’s becoming flexible enough that even if you hate Twitter, you can simply not use Twitter at all and instead use TweetDeck as simply a nearly-live news ticker of information from ONLY LinkedIn. It can be a tremendously useful business intelligence tool. :)
Here’s a screenshot of the TweetDeck interface: http://assets.tweetdeck.com/splashes/frontpage.png
To give you an example of how it can be used, I use TweetDeck for both Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ve set up several different columns with various filters:
In other words, the whole world at my fingertips! bwahah!
TweetDeck is available for PC, Mac, and the iPhone, and your custom columns \ filters \ etc are synced to the server so they’re the same on every device you use it on, which is slick. :) You can download it here: http://www.tweetdeck.com
Enjoy!
Check out Crimecraft: Kingpin for the iPhone!
One of my friends, Mike Arkin at Big Boat Interactive, just released his company’s first iPhone game, CrimeCraft: Kingpin (iTunes link), a free MMO for the iPhone. I’ve been playing it in beta quite a bit and it’s a blast. It’s really reminiscient of all the fun parts of Mafia Wars, except without all the spamming and pointlessness of combat if you have less than 500 friends. Outfitting your gang, sending them into battle, getting new armor and weapons and teaming up against other players is gratifying, and the fact that it’s all real players and is technically an MMO on the iPhone is impressive as hell.
So come support an indie game developer and CrimeCraft: Kingpin (iTunes link)! It’s free, and fun! Clicky-clicky, and spread the word! :)
The difference between success and failure in outsourcing can come down to documentation. Effective and thorough documentation is absolutely the most important component of outsourcing, even more than finding good people! You can have the best artists in the world at your disposal, but if they have no guidelines, insufficient direction and bad documentation, you’ll be lucky to get good results from them.
Documentation is your first line of risk mitigation. Know your pipeline in and out, backward and forward. A prerequisite to outsourcing is knowing your own engine, your project, and can explain every step of the pipeline in detail to someone that’s never seen your project before. If you can’t do that, you are not ready to outsource. Period.
Unless you define the scope of the work so rigidly that there is minimal room for error, you will waste time and money, and your project will suffer. Every minute you spend writing good documentation now will save you ten minutes later.
I go further with this than most, so I urge you to soldier on, because there’s some real meat in here. :)
The Contractor’s Disadvantage #1: No Institutional Knowledge
The first reason for good documentation is that contractors are inherently at an enormous disadvantage compared to an inhouse game developer. Game developers in a studio environment rely on collective institutional knowledge built up over time to do their job every day.
Here are examples of “collective institutional knowledge:”
My point is that you have a network of collective institutional knowledge to lean on if you don’t know what to do. There are many potential points of contact to help you solve problems you’re having. This is very easy to take for granted, especially if you’re not very close to the actual development process.
What should be obvious by now is that external artists don’t have that network! This is often forgotten because the inhouse artists you deal with every day already know all this. Contractors rely on you and you alone to provide them every snippet of information you take for granted so they can do their jobs.
The Contractor’s Disadvantage #2: Unfamiliarity with Games
The second reason for good documentation is that many artists that work at art studios have never worked at a game development studio. They typically don’t have the practical development knowledge and methodologies earned through hands-on development experience. They may not know how game-ready usable assets work. They also may have some key knowledge deficiencies that could result in getting some truly perplexing and unusable art assets back from the art studio.
Examples of “practical development knowledge and methodologies” off the top of my head include:
This type of knowledge comes primarily from the trial and error of putting an art asset into the game on your own. You make the asset, put it in the game, see the problems, then tweak it until it works. Art studios are very rarely involved in that process. Most of the time they’ll never know if there’s something they could do better, or if they’re doing it entirely wrong!
Identifying a common timesink in contracting
A problem I often see is that game developers frequently accept errors like this as “just one of those quirks with working with outsourcing” and never mention it to the art studio. What a mistake!
My philosophy is that an art studio is only as effective as you allow them to be. Letting things like this slide and spending time fixing it yourself every time is a waste of your time. It’s simple math:
The problem with thinking “It’ll take only a minute to fix it” is that it’s not always a one-off expenditure of time. Over time it adds up to a lot of wasted effort. Remember: Your time is also money, and the more of it you spend doing work you can delegate, the more expensive outsourcing is. It really can be self-defeating.
Identifying areas of concern like this and addressing them in the documentation before the problems happen can make the art studio much more effective and free up your time to spend elsewhere. Remember: they have no way of knowing what to do to make sure it works if you don’t tell them!
Granted, this isn’t as big a concern for simpler assets like props and environment pieces. Complex animated models like characters or interactive objects, however, are typically much trickier to develop and implement, and that is not a part of your process you want handed over to someone without a lot of preparation.
The Contractor’s Disadvantage #3: Overseas studios
The risk of this lack of practical development experience is much more likely to be the case overseas, particularly in China and India. I’m going to make some fairly broad generalizations below, so bear in mind that there are individual exceptions, but these are useful to keep in mind when shopping overseas.
I find that there are more people on this side of the pond that want to work on games and have some rudimentary knowledge of how that works. Americans and Europeans, in my experience, are more likely to create their own user-made game modifications or trying to develop their own games for fun. Practical game development knowledge can be gained from activities like this, and finding people with this experience can be a blessing.
It’s increasingly common to see game developers in the US and Europe quit their game development jobs to become full-time contract artists. It can be lucrative and the most talented, effective contractors can make a great living for themselves. The practical development experience they’ve gained in their career prior to this makes them more valuable because they can avoid mistakes in developing art that inexperienced developers wouldn’t know.
However, in countries like India and China, art studios staff up their studios by mass recruitment from art schools. Some even develop their own internal art school or training program to vet, test, train and hire new artists. That’s fine, and even admirable, but they’re limited by what may be a generalized formal education with little to no specialization in game development. There are only a handful of schools in the world that teach game development competently and competitively, and I don’t personally know of any outside of the United States or Canada that do this.
The Contractor’s Disadvantage #4: Inexperienced management
Worse still, inexperience with game development can be an issue at the management level as well as in the trenches. Management at the art studios may not know what questions to ask when bidding on a project that a seasoned developer would. This can create nasty time crunches down the road when you least expect it, because they simply didn’t visualize the process clearly enough to foresee potential problems.
Sadly, this is all a breeding ground for unfamiliarity with games at the management level and at the artist level. You could get art that looks great but is totally unusable. This requires a large amount of rework from your internal artists, or a complete do-over.
When this happens, you lose all the cost benefits of outsourcing. You’re paying salaried employees to rework assets that were already paid for! You’re paying at least double the cost per asset than you need to. This happens more often than developers care to admit. In fact, I’ll bet this is why many developers are disappointed by outsourcing. This risk can be minimized through planning and preparation with thorough, complete documentation.
How much time does this take?
Preparing everything is obviously important, but you must wonder how long it all takes. I won’t beat around the bush – it does take time. But what you may not realize is that this is essentially a one-time expenditure of effort. It happens before the contract begins, so you don’t waste any time when the art assets are in development.
You will waste immense amounts of time if you explain everything to every new artist you bring onto the project. You just want the guy to make art, not tie you up asking questions all day! You should expect them to be confused when they first begin.
The best way to buffer against these delays is to generate thorough and solid documentation before you speak to a contractor. It’s not only the best way to prepare for contingencies before the relationship begins, but it shows them that you’re professional, thorough, meticulous and well-prepared.
The well-organized manager has explicit expectations, and the people they manage take their work more seriously when the instructions they receive are not sloppy. Your contractors will know from the first moment of contact that you know what you’re doing and that you’re the boss. It’s your job to lead, so show you’re a leader in everything you do and say. If you don’t know what you’re doing or what you’re looking for, neither will they, and you won’t get acceptable results.
I have a theory about effective communication I’ll share that will help you with documentation. This is my favorite part of this article, and what you’re least likely to have seen written about anywhere else.
All information creates its own context
When writing documentation, never make assumptions. Even if it seems painfully obvious, every piece of information should create its own context and be totally self-encapsulated. Whenever possible, information should not be dependent on anything other than itself.
Everything relevant should be in one place. You would not believe the amount of time this ultimately saves. If the contractor has a question about something and you’re not available, one of two things happens: Production STOPS, or he GUESSES. Both of those cost you time and money. Leave no stone unturned and leave nothing to chance.
Here are examples on how to write well:
BAD:
GOOD:
After the HeavyOrc _Jungle.tga texture is applied to the Heavy Orc model, rig the Heavy Orc model with the Large Creature skeleton (projectpath://Skeletons/LargeCreatureSkeleton_Base.max) and export it to the Heavy Orc directory (projectpath://Creatures/Large/HeavyOrc/).
See the attached image (HeavyOrc_Example.jpg) for reference.”
These are points at which a contractor could become easily confused. In the first example, there is virtually no context to anything. Here are the points of confusion:
Note closely the way I wrote the “Good” example above: each sentence retains its meaning, even if it’s broken off by itself and removed from the context of the paragraph!
To add to the confusion, let’s say the artist’s manager only copies and pastes part of that instruction to him, and the images aren’t attached to the email he sends to the artist. The manager already knows how this works, but doesn’t realize that the artist working for him does not. Not including clear information that creates its own context wastes time here by requiring the artist to ask the manager what to do and how to do it. He could already be hard at work simply doing his job, but he’s not, because the information doesn’t create its own context and it isn’t clear what he needs to do.
I make sure that all documentation I write is structured this way, then edited to be as readable as possible. It’s a very specific and challenging discipline to constantly ask yourself as you write “Would this make sense all by itself? What information would they need added for this to make sense on its own?”
That’s all I have to say on the subject of how to write effective documentation for outsourcing art. I have other articles coming soon explaining how and why to create an Art Outsourcing Kit using this style of documentation-writing and how it can help you manage contractors more effectively, ramp them up faster and mitigate the risks of outsourcing even further.
I’ve been using Twitter for a couple years now and I’ve gradually gotten the hang of it. A lot of people have trouble seeing what the appeal of Twitter is, though, and it can be puzzlingly difficult to explain for some reason. Someone I know asked me to explain what the appeal is, and after a bit of work, I came up with an explanation of Twitter that people seem to really respond to and understand. I thought I’d repost it here for those interested.
I use Twitter because I like to follow people I find interesting to keep up with. I see Twitter as being a single open IM session with all of my friends at once, without the pressure to respond, but with the freedom to pop in and comment, join an interesting ongoing conversation, or to just lurk quietly and enjoy other people. For me it’s not really a way for people to just yak about what they’re eating. It’s a public conversation… a way to have a massive, distributed conversation that’s only as synchronous as you feel like letting it be. Almost like having a conversation in a bar. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear — you said you’re playing Modern Warfare 2 as well?”
Once you get a decent-sized network, you have an awesome instant support structure to bounce ideas off of and ask questions. I ask technical art questions, information about games or companies, get new music and movie recommendations, and I even had people offering me a place to sleep when I was nearly stranded in Chicago overnight just last night and asked for help.
And the fact that there are so many ways to access it makes it a lot easier to get closer to people, in a way. The quality of your Twitter experience is in some small part a combination of how social you are, how much you ‘get’ the concept of it, and whether or not the people you follow ‘get’ it as well. Honestly, Twitter’s probably useless for 90% of people, but the 10% that use it have a *blast*. It’s tremendously exciting seeing the evolution of personal communication and how small the world is becoming.
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