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!

Here is my FAVORITE Outlook tool. It’s lightning fast indexed search that beats the pants off anything Microsoft has. Microsoft liked it so much, in fact, that they purchased the company, then killed the project completely. This paved the way for their horrible and criminally useless Desktop Search without any pesky competition to get in the way. Hooray!

Anyway, Lookout is the best email search tool ever devised. You can download Lookout here:

http://majorgeeks.com/Lookout_d4808.html

And if you’re using Outlook 2007, follow these VERY simple instructions to make it work:

http://www.belshe.com/2007/12/06/how-to-install-lookout-on-outlook-2007/

Once you have tons of email, you’ll see why this rules so much. :) The flexibility, speed and ease of use is astounding. To give you a brief comparison, I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to make Microsoft Desktop Search manually index my email. After I figured that out, it took 30 hours to index fully. Within 30 minutes of installing Lookout, everything was set up and fully indexed. Lookout’s search is also ridiculously faster and easier to use. It’s the first thing I install with any new Outlook installation. Enjoy!

Anyone have any other handy Outlook plugins? I’ve been meaning to do a post on Xobni as well…

Here’s a small post culled from a question I received in an email. This is by no means an all-inclusive guide or a how-to, but just a couple thoughts on the subject of cover letters.

Small disclaimer: The game industry is WAY more loose and laid-back than other industries, and it’s the only one I’m used to, so your mileage may vary if you’re in a different industry. Take this with a grain of salt and do what’s most industry-appropriate.

I was asked whether I have a standard, boilerplate cover letter or if I customize it for each company. Well, both, actually. :) I always had two templates I worked from: one casual, one businesslike. When I make a cover letter, I always tailor it to each company to a point, but not so much that I can’t produce as many letters as possible in a reasonable amount of time.

If I was emailing someone I knew at that company, I’d go for the casually styled template and keep it slightly more conversational and loose. Leverage any rapport you can if you have it. Being completely businesslike has its place, certainly. But in a more casual industry like games, sometimes it’s better to be casual and approachable but professional. My own writing style could be an example of that.

However, if the cover letter is for a company I don’t have an “in” with, I’d use the more formal template and err on the side of being businesslike and professional.

In either case, this is how I approach customization-per-company. I’d include perhaps half a paragraph to one full paragraph about that company and their products. Always something honest and sincere, and never sucking up. It shouldn’t seem like it’s contrived or just a part of a template, and show some care and knowledge about the company. Pasting in their Wikipedia entry is not a good move. ;)

In terms of how to integrate that into the cover letter, instead of simply pasting in a full paragraph at the beginning or end, I’d try to weave at least one or two references specific to that company into the middle of one of your template paragraphs. It’ll seem more organic and less like it was simply copy-pasted. Be artful about it.

Finally, be *DAMNED* sure you’re not leaving in a reference to another company! ALWAYS work from the clean template when you write a new cover letter. Make the “fill in the blanks” portions of it BRIGHT red, bolded and underlined! Why?

a) you can’t miss them when you’re filling them in,
b) you won’t accidentally leave a part of your template exposed when you send it off.

Leaving parts of a template exposed or mentioning a different company name or product is extremely unprofessional, embarrassing and it’s almost always a deal-killer. Worse still, it’s funny, and your cover letter might be forwarded around to other game developers to laugh at. I’ve seen this. :) Don’t be that guy.

Hope that helps!

Artists: Getting paid is important. If it’s a small studio, they simply may forget to mail off a check in a timely manner. That sucks. It’s usually not intentional. They got the art, which is all they wanted, so they’ve probably moved onto working on something else and aren’t thinking about it anymore.

One way you can counteract this is by setting an expectation as early as possible about when you’ll receive payment after submitting an invoice. If they don’t have a date in their head that you need to expect to be paid by, it’s more likely to slip their mind.

See, if you’re working with inexperienced clients, having a set of expectations you can subtly impress upon them can help give them cues on how to think and act. Here’s an example:

You: “Hey, when I submit my first invoice, what’s a reasonable timeframe to expect the check to be sent to me?”
Them: “Oh. A week or so after the invoice, probably.”

And when you submit the invoice, reiterate it:

“Okay, here’s my invoice. Based on our initial conversation about turnaround time on an invoice, you said to expect about 7 days. Is it reasonable to expect a check on or around [specific date]?”

Everybody trains everybody in their own way. :) If you make your expectations clear and are polite and respectful about it, you’ll make sure your business gets taken care of and they learn how to deal with people more effectively and respectfully.

Managers: One additional way to treat your artists well is to tell them in advance exactly when they’ll get paid after invoicing you, and remind them again when they invoice. Setting and meeting expectations is good business. :)

Ever bookmark a website full of great information, only to revisit it later and discover the link is dead?

Worry no more! HTTrack Website Copier is here, and you need never fret over dead links again.

It’s a free, very easy-to-use, highly customizable tool that automatically downloads webpages in their entirety. You can set how deep you want them to follow links on the page, how to organize them on your hard drive, selectively include\exclude certain filetypes, and much, much more. And perhaps most usefully of all, you can customize how many connections to send at once and whether to cap the maximum download speed so you don’t hassle the server you’re accessing. It’s a very nifty, very clever little application that I’ve used for years.

In fact, I’m using it right now to back up an online copy of a beautiful Illustrated Architecture Dictionary, which has definitions for more architectural terms than I even knew existed. It’s fascinating and has been very educational. It’s the kind of site that I’d hate to lose access to… and with HTTrack Website Copier, now I won’t have to! Not to mention the speed bonus of having everything located locally, because that is a *LOT* of content to constantly be downloading and displaying.

Enjoy!

This may be outlandishly obvious, but for some reason it never occurred to me until this week. Here’s a tip for Art Managers and Artists both!

Art Managers, when I find a portfolio of an artist I like (even mildly), I go to his Links page and find a list of all the artists he links to, which are usually his friends or coworkers. I’ve been finding an absolute treasure trove of great artists I keep liking more and more. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but my oh my has this been fruitful. :)

So, Artists, in your websites and portfolios, link your friends! Get them to reciprocate! It’ll make you all a lot easier to find by chaining your sites together and giving hiring managers like me MULTIPLE paths to finding your portfolio. Remember, it’s all about accessibility and making yourself easier to be found. Get your name and your work out there.

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…

I start from the core belief that my *life* is the project, and that the type of game I choose to work on can help me develop skills I’m interested in acquiring and gain valuable experience. That way it’s always more than a job for me, and it keeps me more motivated day-to-day because I’ve basically got a constant double XP multiplier on all the time :) I’m also able to give a project SO much more because I’m so deeply invested in it on a personal level.

The goals I set and the intrinsic enjoyment I seek out in each project is more important to me than the actual type of game it is. I’ve been involved with a value brand car racer, a low budget cheap FPS, a government-funded cancer awareness 3rd person shooter for kids, an Xbox yoga fitness game, a sci-fi real time strategy game, a big-budget licensed platformer and a small-scale medieval MMORPG. After all that, I honestly have no preference whatsoever for genre, scale, or target market, just because I structure my goals differently than that.

I always set out with a specific set of goals, skills and experience that I intend to gain from a job or task, write it down, and relentlessly pursue them until I feel I’ve learned all I can, and then I start seeking out what’s next for me. I never make lateral moves if I can help it. Life is too full of potentially rich learning experiences to just futz around wasting time. :)

Even I have something discouraging me work-wise, when I remind myself EVERYTHING that I’m getting out of it, it bolsters my will to keep trying. It’s a shot in the arm of pure motivation and energy, and it keeps me going even if I’m feeling crappy. It just takes the optimist’s view. :)

There is ALWAYS something to learn from every experience if you think creatively enough about it. And in that, you can FIND motivation. I really need to write up a post on how learning about marketing helped me do that. When understood properly, marketing really is the applied science of optimism.

But enough about me — what motivates YOU to work?

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? :)

One of my favorite and most-used apps that I might not have talked about before is PathCopy. It copies a filename with full path info to the clipboard *instantly*.

Now I’m curious: What are YOUR favorite productivity widgets? Be they websites, hacks, plugins for preexisting apps you use every day, or useful little applications that brighten up your life, I’m curious to see what you guys use to wring that extra little bit of productivity out of every minute of the day. :)

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!

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?