The new Sony Playstation Portable 2.00 firmware came out yesterday in Japan. This brought us quite a lot of new bug fixes, content updates and features for the Sony PSP hardware.
There’s a wide range of brand-new image and video formats now supported, wallpapers, themes, and the ability to transmit pictures wirelessly. All very cool features.
But these pale in comparison to the best feature of all.
A wireless web browser.
For some reason, even though the firmware was released in Japan only, it’s fully compatible with US PSPs with no apparent side effects. I installed the firmware update yesterday on my own PSP and I’ve had a chance to try out the web browser.
And holy hell, it rocks.
It’s a fully featured miniature browser built into the PSP. You can connect to a wireless internet connection from anywhere and view practically any website. It’s amazing. Here are the five key features it has that collectively blow me away.
1) Tabbed browsing. Like Firefox and Opera, you can open and navigate through multiple websites open at the same time that you can switch between. Just like task switching in Windows.
2) Java \ Javascript support. I can use GMail effortlessly to view, send and receive emails with absolutely no problems. It really, really works like a real browser would, except in the palm of your hand, from anywhere.
3) High resolution. The screen resolution is amazing, and the text and images are perfectly legible. No ghosting, even. You thought the PSP was good for games? It’s amazing for web browsing.
4) A mouse cursor. You can use the tiny analog stick to move a mouse cursor around the screen and to pan the view across a webpage to see everything. It’s extremely easy to use and highly intuitive.
5) Bookmarks. Yes, this even has bookmark support, like any normal browser would, except on a PSP, for free. :)
It also has history, a way to clear cache, delete cookies, etc. It’s absolutely fantastic and has rekindled my interest in the PSP once again. I’m going to carry it with me wherever I go for all my electronically converged needs.
Now, you may be wondering: How can I get my hands on this? Well, you can’t! I won’t tell you.
…
Okay, your pretty blue eyes won me over.
You can download the firmware update here:
Sony Playstation Portable firmware update version 2.00 (Japanese - WILL DISABLE HOMEBREW CONTENT)
And here are the instructions on installing the firmware:
Lik-Sang forums
Very simple, very straightforward, very fun. Just charge up your PSP to above 90%, pop out the UMD, plug it into the wall and run the updater. Ta-da!
Have fun! And buy Daxter when it comes out. :)
Today at work I got a mysterious package.
I wasn’t expecting anything, and the return address was from someplace in another state I’d never heard of.
I picked it up and was confused at how heavy it was. I shook it and it sounded like something metal clinking and sloshing against something else metal and sloshy.
Puzzled, I brought it back to my desk and looked at it for a long moment. Finally I took out my car keys, carefully sawed it open and inside lay a plain white box with no markings of any kind.
I began to open it. As the top of the box opened away from me, another box inside it suddenly jumped three inches out of the box toward me. I gently grasped it by the edges and sat it softly on the floor in front of me. I looked inside the first box and noticed a gigantic rubber band wrapped into the inside of the box, serving as a spring mechanism for shooting the inner box skyward.
I look back at the box that just made a valiant attempt to escape the confines of gravity, and this is what I saw:
This box is covered in shining silver and has nothing but a single white strip along the top of it with the words ‘MOUNTAIN DEW X VARIANT NO. 516′ printed on top.
“What the hell is this?” I thought, not remembering having signed up for anything. My curiosity now piqued, I opened up the smaller box and found this:
Six cans with a green ring on top. I took one out and examined it.
Across the front of the can was printed ‘TEST PRODUCT ONLY - NOT FOR RESALE - MOUNTAIN DEW X VARIANT NO. 516 + POWER PACK’. I noticed the can is larger than normal cans by a full two ounces. I turned it around.
Apparently the Power Pack includes Guarana, Ginseng, Taurine, Maltodextrin and D-Ribose. Ooooh how I love D-Ribose! Interestingly enough, being a huge fan of Red Bull and other energy drinks that are probably bad for me, I noticed that these are ingredients common in them. Except these are in a new Mountain Dew, in an even larger sized can than normal Mountain Dew. Interesting.
Being the kind of guy that eats random things sent to him through the mail by strangers, I pour myself a glass.
HOLY CRAP, IT’S FREAKIN’ GREEN! :D
It’s such a beautiful, offensively luminescent shade of green. The kind of green normally reserved for Granny Smith apples, dangerously radioactive materials and the Incredible Hulk. I like this, and I’ve always liked the dramatic colors Mountain Dew attempts with their drinks. Anyone remember Code Red or LiveWire?
Eager to consume something received from a stranger, I take a sip. It has that distinctive twangy taste of the stronger ingredients of Red Bull mixed with the smooth flavor of Mountain Dew with a bit of orange soda added for good measure.
It really tastes terrific, and I’d happily buy it if it were on the market. I really can’t wait to see this in stores! I’m going to go down the other 5 cans now and stay up all night. Keep an eye out for this one when it hits… it’s fantastic!
Haven’t been posting as much lately, since I ran into a wee spot of crunch at work. Nothing too severe, but enough to take my evenings and energy away from me.
In an effort to counterbalance crunch time I’ve been indulging in as much media as possible. I find that my generally sunny disposition becomes dampened and even sour if I let my life get too one-dimensional.
Here’s what I’ve been reading lately.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
This is a book written in the style of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack to honor of Charles T. Munger, the business partner of Warren Buffett, one of the most talented investors in the world. They’re also two of the richest men in the world. They’re a team, the two of them, and Warren’s the public face of it, Charlie instead preferring to lurk in the background.
Well, no longer.
Charlie’s apparently quite the witty genius, and his friends and family have gotten tired of him not being more widely revered. This book is a loving testament to the person they admire so much, and it’s full of what people say about him and also the talks, papers and lectures he’s given them on life and investing principles.
It starts out being rather emotionally moving, a true labor of love, erecting a sort of shrine to honor him while he’s still alive. I hope someday to have been interesting enough and done enough interesting things to inspire something like this on my behalf. :)
I haven’t gotten particularly far yet, but that’s not saying much, seeing as how the book is so absurdly large that it’s measured in pounds rather than in pages. (”How far along are you?” “About half a pound.”) But it holds promise.
The secret of his investing, it seems, is a slavish devotion to studying multiple disciplines (economics, physics, psychology, etc) and how all the different factors of a company add up to a decision to invest… or not.
What interests me about his approach is that he’s studied all these subjects, found out how they applied to investing, then created a specific framework out of them for analyzing an investing opportunity. By framework I mean a separate independent system of rules and criteria applied to anything, with conditional requirements that need to be met to justify investment.
It’s like a pre-flight checklist of factors to consider before taking off. Partly borne out of the fact that even a genius can’t keep all the information he needs to have at his disposal to make a decision in his head all at once.
I like systems. And that brings me to the next book I’ve been reading…
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
It’s a nifty little book that makes the case for setting up a business as an interconnected series of systems and processes that anyone can follow, so that the business needn’t rely on its principal for its very survival. Put simpler, it’s a guide on how to build a franchised business that anyone can run.
The perspective the book offers is particularly interesting to me because it shows me why businesses like McDonald’s, Starbucks and Quiznos do so well. Someone started the first business, then dove into it and figured out how the core of the business should operate and how to repeat those results. Everything from how long to grill a burger on one side to how many shots of espresso go into what size cup to how long you toast this type of bread has been examined, experimented with, and written down in an operating manual.
Forgetting the quality of the food at McDonald’s, consider its human beings. Generally they’re considered to be slack-jawed doofuses (doofi?) and yet, notice how every single McDonald’s you’ve ever been in has delivered the same quality food to you, no matter where you are. Over however many thousand McDonald’s locations there are, that’s pretty impressive.
At its core, McDonald’s gives you food, quickly, consistently. Because Ray Kroc figured out how everything works and how to make ANYONE duplicate the results of the very first McDonald’s, consistently. Even uneducated 16-year-old high school students can do it, because everything’s planned, written down and systematized.
Everything from how many times to shake the fries as they come out of the deep fryer to what the employees say to customers is a part of this system. These processes are so simple, so boiled down, so pre-planned that anyone, anywhere can do them exactly the same way. All these processes are written down in a book you can hand to anyone and have them follow it, step by step, to run every aspect of the business.
And that’s why these businesses work. Ray Kroc doesn’t have to manage every single individual McDonald’s. Neither does Howard Schultz of Starbucks. That’s why they’re so successful. Delivering consistency is of paramount importance to a franchised business, and every different Starbucks you go to should have drinks that taste the same, instead of vary. These systems destroy variance and establish consistency without any dependency on any one person.
They run themselves.
That’s what these businesses were designed to do. And this book, The E-Myth, shows you how to set up a business like that. It’s about systems, much in the same way that Charlie Munger seems to work on a personal level for investing. He develops systems for himself to run through so he doesn’t have to have every single subject he’s ever studied in mind at the same time, because that would simply be impossible.
That concept interests me at its core. Approach a subject, find out the best way to do it, then set up steps to systematize it and be able to repeat it no matter what. I don’t have to be motivated, or happy, or even awake to do it because I boiled it down to different steps I could follow even if I’m half dead.
To some extent, with 3D art, I’ve done that. I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve pounded every technique, every concept, every mechanical action associated with 3D art into my brain that I can hammer out what I need to with the minimum of brainpower.
Design work still requires creativity and careful thought, but if you can get all that out of the way as early as possible, the rest of the job is smooth sailing. My feelings become irrelevant, just like they should be when it comes to doing my job.
On the job, I encounter a lot of situations where I can’t remember every single step of the process I’m supposed to do because a) we’re figuring it out as we go to some extent, and b) it’s sometimes a LOT to remember. So I started writing these things down as I do them, both for the benefit of the team and so I can have a written checklist of things to do to achieve the desired result, the same way, every time.
It’s been working out extremely well professionally, and I’m already looking at ways I can apply that to my personal life and projects. The biggest appeal in that idea to me is that since I’m interested in so many things at any given time, I can theoretically throw myself face-first at a huge wad of “pre-production” work when I first get interested in something and then periodically maintain it over time without needing a huge time or energy commitment. Because I set up little systems for doing it.
My friend Eric von Rothkirch has been independently having the same thoughts, and recently made a post on exactly what I’ve been talking about.
That’s all for now, just a fun little mind-dump. I have been reading some other very interesting books that I’ll get into soon, when they’re more relevant to the topics that I’m in the mood to talk about. :)
Here’s an article I wrote last year that was extremely well-received but not very widely spread. Thought you professional developers that read me would like to read it.
Outsourcing is sending out work to an outside provider or manufacturer in order to cut costs. This happens in many industries, and it’s becoming widely used in the game industry, particularly for art. Outsourcing art has become an attractive option for game developers seeking to finish on time and on budget. As games get bigger, development costs rise and timelines increase. The sheer mass of art assets required for modern games can be overwhelming for a single team to handle. Hiring an external art studio can be a cost-effective solution.
However, outsourcing art can also have its share of problems. Of the hundreds of studios all over the world, some are large, elaborate operations that are run competently, and others are literally run out of a garage with little finesse. Garage shops seem the rule rather than the exception, sadly. Quality art and service is hard to find. If you know what to look for, however, you can minimize the difficulties and enjoy a terrific business relationship with an art studio.
I’ve been a contract artist for years, both solo and working through an art studio. I also spent eighteen months working for Liquid Development, widely regarded as the industry leading art studio. I was an artist, an account manager and a marketing director during that time. While I was there, I developed an intimate knowledge of how a successful studio is run on many levels, from sales to marketing to operations to production.
This article presents a set of guidelines to ensure a smooth working relationship with an external art studio. Part of this is setting realistic expectations, but there are facets of communication and management that come into play as well.
Step One: Planning
Before you look for an art studio, develop a clear idea of what you want. Art studios are frequently a low-cost, faster solution than creating assets in-house, but they are not miracle workers. It’s unrealistic to expect more of them than your own internal staff. They offer cost savings first and foremost, and quality comes only after that. They need material to work with, and giving that to them is your job.
The most important parts of preparation are solidifying the budget and building a complete bill of materials for the art studio. Quantify everything and leave nothing unaccounted for, and nail down the specifications as precisely as you can. This will ensure a quick turnaround for a price quote from an art studio. Changing the budget or an asset list in the middle of a contract can be catastrophic to your project.
Once you get everything down on paper, solidified, finalized and the budget in place, you will have the materials you need to look for art studios.
Step Two: Looking for art studios
The best place to find an art studio is the GamaSutra contractor listing. Take a look through all of them. Pore over their portfolios and decide if the quality of their work appeals to you. Check to see if they’ve worked in styles and genres similar to your project.
There are several very good studios out there, but expect to pay more for their services. Depending on what studio you choose, you could end up paying between 10% and 80% of what it costs to develop assets in-house. Cost savings are inevitable, and the determining factors after that are quality of art and quality of communication.
No matter what studio you choose, it’s going to be a gamble. Many art studios are garage shops or one-man bands with little track record or business experience. Overseas studios introduce time zone mismatches, language barriers, and potential cultural mismatches. As a popular anecdote goes, Fox outsourced animation and coloring work on The Simpsons to an overseas company. When Fox received the completed work, all the pizzas were colored purple. The people at the overseas studio had never seen or understood what a pizza was, and had no point of reference to begin to understand it. That may seem silly, but factors like that could be the tip of the iceberg.
Step Three: Selecting an art studio
After narrowing down your search to a handful of candidates, contact and grill them. Get them under NDA. Ask them about their history, experience, availability, rough rates, work process, and anything else you can think of. Pay close attention to their answers—their answers and even their manner of reply are good indicators of experience and professionalism.
Any studios left standing should do a test asset for you. This is imperative, since it demonstrates their ability to satisfy YOUR needs. It’s all too easy to trust a good sales pitch and compelling portfolio, but in the end it’s your money and you have to be confident that the team will deliver what you expect.
Once you find which studios you’re comfortable with, you need to give them the materials they need to create a test asset. Regardless of your timeline, do a test asset. Don’t trust them with ANYTHING without getting a satisfactory test asset completed first. Delivery of the test asset lets you see not just the quality of the company’s work, but the company’s development, delivery, and approval processes as well, which are just as important
In preparing to give them the test asset, you should proceed as if full production begins as soon as the test asset is approved. You need to give them all the specifications they’d need to begin the project to minimize the time between test asset and full production and to maintain momentum. Follow the next few steps BEFORE engaging in a test asset.
Step Four: Provide sample assets
Before you begin the test asset, determine the project’s scope in detail and then negotiate the terms of the full contract. Proceed as if the entire project will begin at the end of the test asset’s development.
Get the studios you’re giving a test asset to under an NDA. Once that’s in place, begin the scope assessment process by providing them with all the specifications documents they need. They can’t read your minds. Provide them with at least one actual game asset of each asset type they’re expected to deliver. This will set an expectation of quality standards and cuts down on back-and-forth and guesswork that occur without a pre-approved and usable asset to pore over.
Step Five: Manage expectations
Let’s be realistic about expectations. As I stated previously, an art studio is not a magic pill. Be reasonable and estimate at least two weeks to a month of ramp-up time at the beginning of a relationship, depending on the length of the project and the scope. The time spent developing each asset decreases as the project goes on. Also don’t expect the studio to perform miracles that your internal staff, who is already ramped-up and familiar with the project, couldn’t do themselves.
Step Six: Minimize risk and variability
The next thing to consider is to limit the extent to which external asset development can go wrong. Decide how much of the process to allow them to perform. Some studios are happy simply to outsource modeling only. Others may only require texture work or rework, or simply rigging and animation. Others still outsource ALL character work, from concept to in-game implementation. The more you trust them with, the more there is to screw up.
When I say trust, it really IS a matter of trust. For every task that isn’t a core discipline like modeling, texturing, rigging or animation, expect to add ramp-up time and account for errors while the studio acclimates itself to the specifics of your project. If you don’t think they’re capable of handling all the work you want to give them in the timeframe you require, don’t. If you want it fast, keep it VERY simple. If you want to develop a long-term working relationship with a studio, test them out with a small workload, then expand the scope as you feel more comfortable with them. Nearly every long-term contract relationship I’ve been involved in started out with a very narrow initial scope that kept expanding over time as the art studio proved its reliability.
Step Seven: Negotiate terms
At this point, the studio has a clear idea of what your project is about and the type of work that’s expected of them. Now you can begin the actual contract negotiation. If you pre-planned properly, you will know every single asset you need to outsource for the entire project, and you’ll be able to give them the total number of assets. Stick to that number. Pay for the assets on a per-asset basis, never hourly or in bulk, if you can help it. This way, they’re motivated to get the assets done as quickly as possible and you’ll be able to rapidly expand the project’s scope accurately and predictably if you need. Plan out the rates for each individual asset type and break it into different categories where it’s realistic.
For example, many projects have two types of characters of varying complexity: Player characters and non-player characters. Since they’re different and you anticipate cost savings on the less complex non-player characters, make them a separate asset type. Generally, the criteria for price are polygon count, texture resolution, and texture count. Note any differences between the asset types and negotiate an appropriate price.
Another way to save money and decrease development time is to think hard about which assets are similar and could be reused or modified to create additional assets. A good example of this would be if you had ten characters that are knights in shining armor. If the only difference is their heads, create a “Character Variation” asset type and request that you reuse the bodies and merely create new unique heads. Not only do the models remain consistent, but they take less time to do and you save even more on cost.
Depending on how nice you are, you may or may not want to include provisions for paying extra for significant revisions to an asset. This won’t happen if you accurately spec out the project’s scope beforehand. However, if the situation changes, major design revisions happen internally and you keep going back to the art studio with further changes to an asset, you’ll force the project to fall behind schedule by constantly rejecting submitted art assets that would have easily been approved before the changes.
This happens for one of two reasons: either something was not accurately specified in the initial scope meeting with the art studio, or you’re subjecting the art studio to feature creep and design changes on your side. Understand that feature creep is your problem, not theirs. You’re paying them for individual art assets, not their time. Every minute your design changes make their artists sit idle is another delay you add to the project because they’re forced to reassign artists to other projects unless they’d rather burn money.
Art studios are used to dealing with this to some extent, but if you keep allowing it and it affects the schedule, the art studio may be forced to raise its rates dramatically or abandon the project. This is why it’svitally important for you to plan for and solidify everything before you even speak with an art studio. If you anticipate dramatic design changes, simply add provisions for design changes to the contract before you start the project. Ultimately, planning for this in advance could save you money versus increasing the cost per asset.
Step Eight: Scheduling milestones and payment
The ideal way to set up milestones and payments in my experience is this: There’s a milestone every two weeks. The assets must be delivers on the day of the milestone. Every other milestone, you receive an invoice for payment on a NET30 term, which means that you’re required to pay them within 30 days of receiving their invoice. When the project starts, there’s a starting payment. Each payment is derived from the project’s total cost divided into equal amounts over every other milestone. The test asset period is payable once the assets are delivered and approved.
For example, let’s say it’s an eight-week project for $100,000. The project starts on August 1. You have milestones August 15, September 1, September 15, and October 1. You’re billed on August 1, September 1 and October 1. The first payment is $33,000, the next payment is $33,000, and the final payment is $34,000.
Earlier milestones should have fewer deliverables than later milestones due to ramp-up time. In the example project I stated above, let’s say the project is to create 100 characters. The August 15 milestone has 10 characters, then each successive milestone has 30 characters delivered for a total of 100. Always start out light.
I’d suggest setting up the project milestones so they deliver the assets at least two weeks to a month before you actually need them to achieve your internal goals. You don’t want to be held up by the studio if they’re late delivering assets, so schedule accordingly.
Step Nine: Assigning the test asset
Now that you have the entire project planned out, select at least one test asset of each type to assign the studio. For example, if you’re outsourcing environment objects, player characters and lower detail non-player characters, test them on each asset type. Never believe that just because they can do one asset type well that they can do others equally well. Each studio has its own distinct strengths and weaknesses. Many artists that work for art studios have very little professional experience and only work there until they have a strong enough resume and portfolio to get hired at a full game development company. Others simply aren’t good enough to get a job anywhere else. Artist turnover at an art studio can be very high and happen during projects. This isn’t something you can control, and it’s nearly always transparent to you, but it happens.
Once you receive the completed test assets, check them vigorously for quality. If they fail in any respect, immediately consider whether you gave them enough information. It’s easy for some specifications to fall into the cracks, so be reasonable. Ask yourself if the assets they delivered are usable assets as-is, and if any internal rework will be required. It’s very important to understand that if your internal artists have to do ANY rework at all of the assets you’ve outsourced, the art studio has failed. It’s reasonable to expect a bumpy start, but if your internal artists are habitually redoing the art studio’s assets, you’re paying almost double for that asset and the problem should be solved immediately or the relationship terminated at the next milestone.
After you approve the test assets and are ready to move into a contracting relationship, I’d recommend making a personal visit to their offices if it’s geographically convenient. A face-to-face meeting always helps and is a great way to start a long-term business relationship. In my experience, it’s dramatically faster to generate new business. Two months of work over email and a phone can be handled in half an hour of face-to-face discussion.
And that brings me to the final step…
Step Ten: Understand the importance of communication
The key to success in outsourcing is communication and feedback. Some art studios are poor at this, and simply take the assets you give them, work on them for the allotted time, then email them back to you when they’re done. You’re left wondering what you’ll get when you open the file and hoping desperately that you can use them. They may send work-in-progress images in mid-milestone so you can know they’re doing the work, but the ideal solution is an interactive forum so you can see each asset being developed.
However, a system like that doesn’t work unless everyone actually uses it to communicate. The simple existence of a system doesn’t guarantee success; the adherence to and use of the system does. It’s important to remember is that outsourcing art is not a magic pill. It requires a time commitment on your part the same as one of your in-house artists. In short, BE AVAILABLE for questions, comments and critiques and monitor their progress at least daily if possible.
Since communication is so important, when you talk to an art studio, assess how well they understand the importance of communication and what they do to solve it. Perhaps your assets aren’t important enough to require day-to-day managing, but at least find out if you could if you wanted.
Once, an art studio’s client had a very interesting idea that fostered a tremendously successful working relationship. The client hired a new in-house employee whose sole responsibility was to monitor the art studio’s progress all day, every day. There was always someone payingattention, communicating, and approving or rejecting assets practically as soon as they were created. It worked out extremely well and the project went smoothly because of that employee and the high level of communication that was developed at the outset of the project.
You don’t necessarily need to have such an intense level of involvement, but it’s foolish to assume you can throw work at an art studio and expect it to get done with no communication. Quality communication is the difference between success and failure. Always have at least one person who’s assigned to monitor the art studio’s progress and communicate directly with the art studio’s internal art manager. Having a person on your end do this is a necessity, and they must understand that this is a part of the core content development process instead of something they should do at the end of the day, IF they have time. The sooner you accept outsourcing as a function of game development rather than a shiny new toy, the sooner you’ll have an unstoppable content development team that works like a well-oiled machine.
I place a high value on communication because a lot of contracting relationships have gone sour because the game developer didn’t understand the necessity of communication, and all deficiencies in the resulting assets were blamed on the art studio’s supposed incompetence.
So there you have it. Outsourcing can be a terrific resource if you plan ahead, select a good studio, provide ample specifications andmaintain a high level of communication and management throughout the project.
If you have any comments or questions about outsourcing art, hiring contractors or asset development in general, feel free to send me an email at jonjones@gmail.com.