Being a character\hard surface artist for a ton of productions and being inside their feedback\approval stages, I have seen my fair share of “why is this being done that will only be noticed by 0,0001% of the player base and is making Artists waste a ton of time on it ?”
For this, i need to give context, i need to show a more global picture of how Game Artists operate in studios ( it might change in some studio settings, this is just a broad generalization ) :
Now, let's say the game production is set to take around 3 to 5 years, remember, the more time it takes, the more it has to sell\keep player traction, and, again, I`m making a broad generalization, as each production has its unique aspects and also the target audience\live service or not etc etc, but let's go with a traditional non-live service type of game. We can start at the pre-production stage.
During pre-production, it is my professional opinion where the “make it or break it” aspect should happen ( in terms of Art aspect which is what i am more proficient with ), as it's here where it will be decided all the tech budgets such as ( won't put them all again due to them being too many, but more relatable to art aspect ):
Once all these aspects are “solved” together with all the others that aren't mentioned, we should move onto full production, but making sure that during the testing stage, there is always updated documentation present, as this is one of the biggest time saver to a whole production as it saves time from Leads and Seniors to answer\give feedback on stuff that, by just existing in confluence, shouldn't be asked. Your internal staff and Outsourcers will be VERY thankful for this, specially Juniors !
Something very important as well, is to make sure that there are no “recipe” deviations of the workflow, for example:
This will make sure that each asset is tailored with the memory budget in mind and even tho “but muh nanite” is a bit prevalent, it will allow for smoother gameplay, more room for special effects like ray tracing etc to not have horrible frame rate due to the saving of resources on aspects that are in direct control of the artists. Standardized workflows to be as non-destructive as possible should also be encouraged, so that Artist X can pickup the assets from Artist Y and avoiding having to redo stuff, like colapsed smooth modifiers\non-preserved booleans, Zbrush modeling in hardsurface that needs to be altered, thus having it beeing redone from scratch…
To finalize this, as an Artist myself, i can recognize several ego problems in Visual production for games, i am at fault of this sometimes, altho i am trying to get better at it, what i mean by this :
Its very important to think of a game production as a whole, avoid egos and LISTEN to people that want to say something, even juniors can teach Leads alot ! This shouldnt be a self-masturbatory experience, this should be a Team effort that in the end, if it goes well, everyone wins !