It’s public now — I’ll be speaking about outsourcing at Casual Connect Seattle at 12pm on July 25! :)

Go register and check it out!

I’m excited. Woo!

This is a followup to my Project: Outsource Everything post, nearly a year later.

To be frank, almost everything I planned to do succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. :) Not without a few hitches and problems from which I learned much, but on the whole, my crazy notions were a complete success. It’s actually silly how well they’re going now. I’ll go through them point by point:

The only thing I didn’t do was find a standards enforcer, which is really quite ambitious and has horrifying, far-reaching implications that I don’t want to mess with since we’re a live game. Maybe if he was inhouse I’d think about it, but that’s such a Herculean task that can make everything blow up that I’m abandoning that idea entirely.

You know, it was pretty cool to go back, read that post, and find out everything I did totally, completely, fully worked. Quite a nice confidence-booster. :) I have a few ideas for what’s next, and I’ll formulate those into a post soon!

Do any of you have questions about any of these things I’ve done? I’m happy to share all the knowledge I can, especially if I can go into any more detail on mistakes I’ve made and what I learned from them. Yay knowledge!

I’m on a major feedback-writing pass this week and I had seven feedback maxims I’d like to share:

1. Make subject lines COUNT. Be as descriptive and meaningful as possible, especially when dealing with contracts. Use special easily searchable key words like “ArtStudio signed contract AS-0004″ or “(2008-05-15) Feedback for Fat Stinky Orok.”
2. Everything MUST create its own context. Act as if the feedback you’re writing is the only feedback you’ve ever written to them. Never create dependencies on past feedback! If you need to, re-paste relevant feedback from a previous email. Be specific, and don’t say “do it like that one time” when you could say “In the 2008-05-12 feedback revision when I asked you to adjust the size of the legs.”
3. Official feedback comes from one place ONLY. I’ll answer very basic work-in-progress questions in an instant messaging app, but for me, OFFICIAL feedback is only for email. Feedback comes from only ONE place! This establishes a consistent approach with the artists, gives you a paper trail, minimizes your contact points and gives everyone only ONE place to search.
4. Save feedback to its OWN directory. I have a directory for each individual contractor I work with. It’s divided chronologically by their asset deliveries and my reference and feedback drops. Every piece of feedback I ever send them gets saved into a text file and dropped into the appropriate dated directories. This makes it blazingly easy to refer to whenever I need it.
5. Save ALL work-related instant messaging chat logs. If a casual IM conversation turns into something work-related, save all the relevant bits from that log into the same feedback directory. Every piece of correspondence is important, especially for potential legal issues that may arise in the future. Keep everything in one place!
6. NEVER include a hyperlink to an image. The site can go down. Always save it, name it meaningfully and attach it in the email, forum post or FTP drop.
7. ALWAYS specify filenames. In the feedback, never say “check the attached image” without giving the image’s exact filename! This will aid searching later. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through old feedback and seen that and thought “WHAT IMAGE?!?” and had to search through old emails.

These tips will make all your feedback ridiculously easy to search through and refer to anytime you need, ever. It DEFINITELY pays to be smArt and organized. Leave nothing to chance and let absolutely NOTHING slip outside of the organizational systems you create! A system is only as effective as one’s continued adherence to it. Making even ONE exception defeats the system’s purpose. From there, it’s a slippery slope, and the system falls apart.

If I’d known these tips going into this job I’d have saved myself countless hours of pain and struggle. :) I’m wincing to imagine the HOURS I’ve spent trying to find “that one email where I’m SURE I asked you to…”

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? :)

The Ready At Dawn website has updated and apparently, Daxter has sold over TWO MILLION COPIES worldwide. Holy fucking shit!! :D

I just updated my Blogroll with links to a wide variety of the many friends and acquaintances I’ve made in the game industry. Go have a look! Mouseover links to see who they are and where they work, where applicable.

Lots of damned interesting, cool people in there. :)

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. :)

I made a forum post this week on what information I provide to the studios I outsource my animation work to, and I thought I’d repost it here.

The speccing process for animation work needs to be detailed and thorough, as does as the reference. However, most of this work only needs doing once, and the rest is easily templatable. If you have a basic list of animations per character or creature type to start with, outsourcing animation can be a surprisingly simple process once the rest of the groundwork is laid.

This is everything I provide my animators:

• All the source MAX files for other creatures of that class and race for comparison.
• A specific document for each individual creature I’m having animated. It contains the following:
1. A two-paragraph description of the character’s backstory, attitude and movement style, referenced against his racial traits.
2. A description of his preferred idle state, walk and run movement, and attack style.
3. A detailed list of every animation, description of which hands and feet do what, what default position it needs to revert to, the exact number of frames required per sequence, a copy-pasteable copy of the animation scripting needed in MAX, naming convention guidelines, and all other technical specifications and style descriptions.
4. Specific instructions (where applicable) of what needs to happen on specific frames to match ingame timing.
5. An explicitly detailed list of technical constraints and guidelines.
6. Any immediate references I can make (”similar to X creature’s attack or movements”)

On all my feedback to them, I provide extremely specific information on which limb or bone I want to do what, on which frame, for how many frames, and the style in which it should move. For extra information, I offer screengrabs of what’s wrong (if anything), and offer AVI or MAX file source art reference when available. I generally have 1 to 2 iteration passes per individual animation, which is pretty badass. :)

One of the real value-adds I’ve found in assembling all this information is that most of it can be classified easily and packaged into a generic “Monster Animation Kit” or “Player Character Animation Kit” complete with references, tech specs, etc. The only specific information that needs to be transmitted with each asset is the backstory and movement style. In other words… I really only gather *all* that information once. It’s far less daunting than it sounds. ;)

To the managers and artists out there — is there any other relevant information you can think of that would be useful to provide in this packet?

Based on the last ~15 months of contracting out concept art, I’ve
refined my style a bit and just made a dramatic change in the way I
parcel out work.

I used to price out concept art per piece. Everything from initial
roughs to polish to ink to color to turnarounds was a single asset at
a single price.

I noticed a tendency, though — the artists, in their desire to get
paid sooner rather than later, would rush through the initial roughs
too quickly and try to finish each piece of art as fast as they could.
That’s totally natural and to be expected, since I’m not paying them
for their time, but for the finished result. But I felt like I was
losing out on a lot of potential ideas. So I asked myself, how can I
get the most out of the initial idea-generation process?

Then it came to me. It’s simple: Break it into two phases: Rough Phase
and Polish Phase.

The initial Rough Phase can include a pre-set number of sheets of
rough ideas and some basic pencil tightening and ink, but no color. I
spend a reasonable amount of money and time on this phase, and I make
the Rough Phase its own end, instead of an annoying stepping stone to
a finished piece. I get a wide variety of ideas, then determine which
rough concepts to move forward with and polish. The roughs get done,
and they get paid.

The next and final phase, the Polish Phase, is where I take the ideas
I selected in the Rough Phase and finish them off. I get color
thumbnails (to experiment with a wide variety of potential color
schemes), final coloring, the turnarounds and the inevitable last
minute spit-shine.

Voila, you have a finished concept! You get the full benefit of the
rough idea phase where you can bounce around ideas all you want
without the “finish the entire concept” pressure, and then once that’s
wrapped, you approve it and pay him.

And to the artist, he basically gets paid two times for one concept.
AND his earning potential increases!

Wait, what? How does his earning potential increase?

If you’re anything like me, the wide variety of ideas he generated in
the Rough Phase will find their way into two to four brand new
concepts that wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been broken up into
two phases. YOU get more ideas, HE gets more work. Not just that, but
since you priced each phase out differently, you can very quickly and
effectively amend the contract to add more Polish Phases at the
pre-agreed price terms!  No more time spent negotiating. Get that all
done up-front!

Could it get any better?

…no, seriously. If there’s a better way than this, I want to know
about it so I can scrap this and DO it! :)

So last night, some thieving, bottom-feeding piece of shit kicked the window of my condo, climbed inside and took off with my 360, all my games, and my laptop that has all of my personal information of the last several years on it.

After I called the police and got over my initial shock, I reverted into the aspect of my personality I’m most in touch with and best at functioning under: Get-Shit-Done Mode.

Now, aside from the extreme shittiness of getting robbed, this is actually a really interesting problem solving opportunity. What do you do when someone potentially has all of your personal information and could do absolutely anything they wanted to with it? What countermeasures can you take to stop him from screwing with your life? The scope is enormous and the possibilities are really fucking unpleasant. Where should I start?

First off, find out what he took.

* My Xbox 360.
* All nine of my 360 games (many recently purchased.)
* My laptop.
* The beer from my fridge (oh, you ASSHOLE!)

All things considered, that’s not bad. He left a lot of other valuables behind, and I appreciate that much.

Second, empower the police as much as possible.

The police can track stolen goods via serial numbers, so that if they show up at a pawn shop, they’re run through the police database to check to see if they’re stolen. If so, red flag, and I get my stuff back. Yay!

I wisely purchased a warranty with my 360 when I got it a couple years ago, and it had my serial number on it. I wrote it down. Then I called Dell to get my laptop’s serial number. I gave both to the police. I also reported both as stolen to their respective companies so all future support to those devices will be forbidden, making them a lot less useful. :)

Third, find out what information on me he has.

He left my desktop PC but took my laptop, which is slightly out of date but still has all my information on it. I have a perfect mirror of my laptop’s My Documents folder on my desktop PC, so I started poring through it to see exactly what sensitive files he had access to. Unfortunately, it’s pretty bad.

* All my bookmarks.
* Quicken.
* Bank statements.
* All my bank account numbers.
* What few passwords I’d scrawled here and there (stupid, I know.)

Essentially, my liability here is HUGE. To protect myself, I’ll essentially have to sever every meaningful financial tie I have, sever myself from all my normal resources, and create an entirely new support structure for my life on paper and survive in the meantime. I may even have to get a new social security card over this. I have no choice. I can’t risk not doing it.

This is pretty bad, but I can work with this. :)

Fourth, make a to-do list and do it.

* Delete bookmarks remotely. (see below)
* Generate list of compromised passwords.
* Generate list of every website I need to change my password on.
* Close all bank accounts and reopen them with new numbers.
* Cancel all debit and credit cards and get new ones.
* Schedule glass installation.
* Schedule security system installation.
* Install window clamps\locks on every window.

The first and fastest thing I could do to protect my data was to delete all my bookmarks remotely. See, I have a bookmark synchronizer called Foxmarks that syncs all my bookmarks to a remote server so they’re the same on every PC I use. Great app. So I immediately saved a local backup of all my bookmarks, deleted all the bookmarks, then synced to the server so there wouldn’t be any bookmarks there. Now, the next time he starts Firefox from my stolen laptop, it’ll automatically sync to the server and delete ALL the bookmarks on that machine. Zing!

So I worked through the rest of the list point by point. I created all-new passwords and threw out ones I’ve used for years. I called my banks and cancelled accounts I’ve had for years and opened new ones. I’ve been cutting up all my credit and debit cards because I can only assume they’ve been compromised. I changed my passwords on nearly 25 websites I use on a daily basis because there’s a possibility they could be compromised.

Fortunately, I just got a new credit card that’s not recorded ANYWHERE, so I can live off of that for a few days while I wait for my new ones to come in.

I scheduled what appointments I could, then went to Home Depot for all the security measures I need to secure my home. I installed these badass window clamps on every single window and sliding door in my condo, and put dowel rods in the other appropriate locations so the doors and windows won’t open.

I also installed a stronger light bulb out on my porch to better the lighting situation and decrease the chances of this happening again. My next step after that is to start installing even more powerful outdoor lighting so the potential entry points are better lit than they were before, and won’t be as appealing a target as they used to be.

I’ve arranged for an glass repairman to come out and fix the glass on Monday, and also for an alarm company to come out ASA-fucking-P to install an alarm system. I’d really like it if the alarm system offered all manner of horribly lethal countermeasures but I’m not sure if I’ll be that lucky.

I’m tentatively planning to buy a gun or two to keep around the house and get all that taken care of from a legal licensing standpoint, in the offchance that anyone should break in while I’m home so I can immediately riddle their body with hot shrieking lead death and snatch their joke of a life right out of them. As is my Texas-given right! :) Yay Texas.

So far I’ve actually already done about 95% of everything I need to do to legally, financially, and personally protect myself and my privacy. It’s just a few more little steps and I’ll be done. It’ll all be more or less done in an evening and a day.

In a weird way, as much as this sucks, this was exciting and fun just because I’ve never had to deal with a mindfuck like this before. It makes me feel powerful to be able to take shit like this and flip it on its head and just take care of business like it’s anything else, without getting cloudy or stupid or seizing up. I’m even a little proud of myself for it.

So, let’s see what the next few days bring!