Here’s a fun life update for my friends and family that read the site. I’ll hide it all behind the jump lest I clutter up all my useful chatter. :) Warning: Fairly intense and not about game art outsourcing. (more…)

My friend Nate sent me a fantastic article that was right up my alley: 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website.

The whole thing is so good I’d just paste the whole thing here if I told you which parts were worth reading. Instead I’ll touch on my favorite points:

3. If your website asks the user which version they’d like, high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash, you ALSO LOSE.
5. DO NOT try to reinvent the website navigation.
11. Text navigations are better than images
12. A well thought out site map with logical sub sections is better than using “drop downs”.

The whole thing is a fantastic read. Go look at it and commit it to heart!

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. :)

Here’s an edited excerpt of an email I wrote for someone asking me for tips on putting together an environment artist portfolio.

Focusing on environments but keeping your skillset broad is a good idea. Environment artists will always be needed, more so now that next gen games are getting crazy huge and complex. While this will generate a lot more competition for you, it also creates more opportunities to get hired.

I haven’t dealt much yet with environment artists, but I think the same basic rules apply to them as to any other artist… show all your work. By that I mean, show wireframes of the model, the high poly object, and the flat textures (spec, bump, diff, glow). When you do this, I don’t have to wonder if you understand how to paint a good texture or make a good normal map, because you show me every step of the process.

Another tip is to show your work in an actual ingame environment when you can. Drop your assets into Half-Life 2 and make them look like they belong there, and actually function.

Your goal is to make stuff that’s competent and game-ready. It’s a very powerful statement if you can put things into games on your own and make them work. It’s one less step of abstraction for hiring managers to make… by that I mean, I don’t have to look at a render, and imagine what it’d look like in a game, because you already PUT it into a game.

Show me what you CAN do, and minimize how much I have to IMAGINE you being able to do.

Don’t just put little single assets into the game, if you can help it. Make areas. Rooms. Set pieces. Show you know not only how to make individual objects but put them together into a scene, and make them look good. The simpler and clearer you can illustrate all these, the better your chances of getting hired. :)

That’s a pretty tall order and not a lot of people do these things, but that ought to help.

I’d love to hear more tips and suggestions if you guys have any. :) Am I missing anything?

Here’s a quick one. Ever wanted to be able to view TGA files in thumbnail form in Windows Explorer, only to find that Windows won’t support it? Be frustrated no longer, for Thumbplug TGA is here.

Just download and install, and view thumbnail TGAs wherever they might be. Invaluable little plugin.

[update] Sven-Erik Neve in the comments pointed me to Koshigaya Thumbnail Support, which is the same thing as ThumbPlug except that it also supports PNG, PSD and every other major format. I tried it and after closing Explorer a couple times, it WORKS! Thanks Sven-Erik!! :) [/update]

One of my friends from work suggested that I give TaskSwitch XP a try. What’s so great about it, you may ask? Envision this scenario:

You have 30 programs open. You hit Alt-Tab, and you’re selecting program #2, and you want to select program #15. Instead of holding down Alt and hitting Tab 13 times, TaskSwitchXP lets you simply mouse over the icon you want. Release Alt, and it opens the app you want. Being able to simply mouse over everything to open it is beautiful, instead of alt-tabbing around blindly. It becomes second nature VERY quickly.

It’s a *complete* replacement for Windows’ Alt-Tab. It’s very easy to turn off and uninstall if you don’t want to use it anymore, however. :)

It’s decently customizable and it also provides full-sized window previews of all your windows, which you can selectively turn off if you choose. I wish I could disable it entirely, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

Agent Ransack is the best and fastest search tool I’ve ever used.

Anytime I need to find something — anything — I use Launchy to fire it up, quickly type in the first few characters of what I’m looking for and where, and it finds it almost instantaneously. It’s lightning fast, far beyond what Windows Search could ever dream of doing, and it’s deadly accurate.

I used to use Launchy for quickly searching and opening any file I needed, but I kept having to add new directories to the index and rebuilding the index to be searchable. Now that I found Agent Ransack, I use Launchy strictly for shortcuts.

I use Agent Ransack dozens of times a day instead of digging through Windows Explorer to find the files I want. It’s so damned fast, nice and efficient, especially when you’re dealing with tens of gigs of data and hundreds of thousands of files. :) I can’t recommend this app enough.

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?

I expanded a bit more upon the questions I was asked by Monster.com and had a few more bits of helpful advice to entry level game developers. Check it out:

What are some of the qualities it takes to succeed and thrive in the games industry?

Passion, persistence, and adaptability.

Passion is a given. You have to love making games or you will never make it. Part of the reason the game industry is this popular is because if it ever comes down to choosing a candidate based on his degree or his level of passion, passion wins. Passion shows itself through the quality of your work and your attitude, and games are a great way of bringing that out of people.

Persistence is just as important because the game industry is definitely a place you can succeed in if you can bring the quality of your work up to par and simply “show up” consistently. Just be there, keep trying, and you’ll make it. The game industry really isn’t for everyone and a lot of people end up leaving it because they just can’t maintain that passion for it. If you can keep showing up, keep trying and hang in there, you’ll succeed.

Adaptability. Game developers often switch companies every two to three years, and it’s normal to do. Technology also develops at an incredible rate so you have to reinvent your skillset constantly. It’s very much a survival of the fittest type of environment. Studios open, studios close, and the industry moves at a nearly breakneck pace. You have to adapt constantly and be willing to ride the waves of change or you’ll get left behind. But hey… if you’ve got passion and persistence, adaptability takes care of itself.

The industry has a reputation for requiring long hours from coders, designers, and others. Do you think that reputation is deserved? And if so, why is that?

It’s absolutely deserved. Crunch time is a reality in many studios and I have done it. Technology is advancing at an unbelievable rate and the complexity of video games increases every year, and the sole purpose of a game is to deliver fun — but how do you schedule fun? Game developers have traditionally been exempt from being paid overtime, although in some studios run by Electronic Arts and THQ, this is starting to change for some of their employees. I’m hopeful that this will inspire developers to have a financial incentive to schedule more effectively instead of throwing bodies at scheduling
problems.

Given the demands, what are the rewards of working in the games industry?

Fun. If you can find the right company and the right team, you will be in heaven. Awesome coworkers, good money, company outings, practical jokes, free video games, beer Fridays, Nerf fights, no dress code, and a totally fun, lighthearted environment you can be completely relaxed in. You don’t need an education, either, which is terrific. You are as good as the quality of your work, not the school you went to.

We’re all a bunch of big kids that LOVE what we do, and we try to harness that passion and excitement for our craft and give gamers the games they want to play.

What are the top two or three tips or pieces of advice you would offer to someone interested in getting into the industry?

1. Specialize. Decide what you want to do, be it art, programming or design, and focus solely on that. Once you decide specifically what you want to do, it’s a much easier target to hit both in terms of focusing your goals as well as in marketing yourself.
2. Live games. When you’re not at work, live, eat, breathe and play games. Make stuff for games. Buy Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 and make user modifications for it. Make your own new weapons, or levels, or program a mod, or design a new singleplayer campaign. Pretend you’re actually working on the game yourself professionally to get yourself into the game developer mindset. These are learning experiences as well as valuable portfolio pieces!
3. Socialize. Find game developer groups online, like the International Game Developer’s Association (www.igda.org), Gamedev.net (www.gamedev.net), and GamaSutra (www.gamasutra.com). Make friends there that also aspire to be game developers! Befriend real professional game developers and learn what you can from them. Getting into the industry is very much about who you know, and there’s a goldmine of online resources for helping make that happen.

What are your guys’ thoughts on that? :)