One challenge we faced at 2XL was assigning, organizing, and tracking art assets made by our external art outsourcing partner. How do we specify what we want from our outsource partner? How and where is it all stored? How do we keep track of everything from the early specs given to the outsource studio through several revisions and through to a final product?

Our solution to this set of problems was an application created in-house that would integrate with Microsoft Project, a database (SQL), version control/tracking (SVN), and traditional email. Thus, our producer could enter tasks in Microsoft Project, artists in our studio could assign the specifications such as poly count and texture budget for a future asset or give feedback on a previously submitted asset, outsource artists could view specs or reference photos and read feedback from artists in our studio, and all parties involved were emailed updates when an important change occurred. This whole system was based around a single application that we called the 2XL Asset Manager.

I jumped into work on Asset Manager just a few weeks after its inception and took over the task of getting core functionality up and running as well as documenting the application for local and outsource artists. The image below is the main window of Asset Manager where a great deal of information was accessible within a single click. Users could select given asset types that they wanted to “watch,” thus improving the signal to noise ratio and allowing a user to subscribe to only the areas of the game on which they were working (e.g. Vehicle artists won’t care about updates from environment art tasks, and vice-versa). Also, clicking any given level or vehicle class resulted in a background SQL query of the assets in that section, listing completion status, assignment details, as well as check-in and reference history. New updates were presented as clickable (web-style) links in the lower left-hand status window, giving the user quick access to anything that changed since the last time they used the system.

Clicking on any of the individual results from the main list display of the previous window would take a user to the next screen, visible below, with a detailed view of a given asset. Here, local (supervising) artists had priviledges to update specs, upload concept art or reference images, and correspond with outsource artists via a notes pane. Similarly, outsource artists could read asset specs, download reference images, and post any questions to supervising artists if they were in need of assisstance. Any change, be it from supervisor or outsource artist, would trigger an email update for all parties who had subscribed to the given asset. This allowed our producer and outsource management to follow along with the process of asset creation without clicking into every single asset to read its notes during the process. Even those who were not fluent in the Asset Manager could stay informed, as we lowered the barrier to entry down to the level of being able to read email.

Managing the actual asset data was a key focus as well. Our goals were to have versioning capability and an easy-to-understand visual interface. What we came up with was the following screen which connected to our internal SVN server and seemlessly notified the outsource artist what files they had changed (shown in bold green), and allowed them to create batches they could upload when they left work for the evening. This was due to the nature of the large files (the primary culprits were photoshop source art files), many of which were 100MB or more having to be transmitted via a secure VPN connection from the outsource studio in China to our studio in the United States. Using the check-in functionality of Asset Manager, an artist could click through the work they had done for the day on one or more assets, create a “batch,” click “submit batch” and let the system upload and process everything overnight. Again, this would notify via email all relevant parties when the files had successfully transfered and checked-in to our SVN server.

There are many features that I have left out of this description for the sake of brevity. But, suffice it to say the Asset Manager was an interesting task for me at 2XL. I was constantly taking feedback from our outsource studio as well as my local co-workers to improve and refine the system, releasing new updates regularly via an automated update system that I developed. The capabilities of the system as a whole were really quite impressive, given the fact that I was the only developer actively maintaining it and it was only a side project (as the first year of my stay at 2XL was under the title of “Artist”)!