How to handle Artist and developer collaboration in game projects?
Collaboration in a team can be difficult. Everyone has their own tasks and priorities and this causes friction, especially if you're depending on someone else to prepare test builds and need to wait for them to finish their work before you can continue with yours.
This article https://blog.codemagic.io/unity-artists-developers-collaboration/ proposes a possible solution. What do you think, would it work for you? Could something like this help improve collaboration? And do you have any other ideas which could help?
How do you currently do this in your game projects? Do the artists rely on testing in the editor, do the developers in your team manually build test builds for artists or do you use some tools or processes for making the collaboration easier? All input would be much appreciated.
Replies
This article doesn't "provide a solution", it's a piece of advertising.
@pior The purpose was to honestly initiate discussion on the matter. What do you think of the matter? Have you experienced issues in collaboration where some tooling or processes could help and do you maybe have ideas or insights on how to make things easier?
Well - which "artist and developer relations" difficulties did you encounter, yourself ?
**Edit**I misunderstood the original post. So making an edit to add a bit of clarification to my original comment.
From my understanding, the link you provided is about "codemagic". This "automation" tool automatically creates and deploys game updates (builds) to be previewed on device?
The language in the article is a bit confusing/vague.
Personally, I don't find it something I would personally need. Generally, I can verify 98% of my art in the editor in Unity.
If necessary I can very quickly use Unity's built-in "Unity Remote" to see my art on device.
Obviously if a project already has this setup then I'll use it. But it's really not necessary for "artists and developer collaboration".
When it comes down to collaborating with artist I feel less automation would be ideal.
I prefer to think of this as simply communicating across a team. It's not productive to think of artists as separate from "developers". Everyone who is developing a game is a developer.
I'm confused as to what the issue is supposed to be? artists don't need to 'integrate' their assets in unity. You can just save it into the relevant unity folder and the editor does the rest?
allowing the modeler to import his model into the game engine will remove what will very likely become a bottleneck, even with a tech artist in place. creating a barebone document that helps guide your artists through the process will help them name, place, and set-up assets in such a way that mitigates problems.
some editors allow user permissions that can simplify a new user's interface so that they are not overwhelmed by deeper features and can easily access the dials most relevant to their work.
an external asset viewer tool may be useful for remote or freelance artists to polish their work to look as intended without a need of installing the editor and pulling down hefty project files. if the artists have access to the editor and project files, creating them a lit test scene to view their assets in may be useful, if they're unable to create their own sandbox. aligning results 1:1 with viewports of content creation tools would also be very helpful were your engine or tools programmer up to the task.
I work remotely. I have no problem downloading an entire copy of the latest build every day.
Game artists should be able to import and setup their own assets. That's their job. I understand that there might be some project specific setup but it's something the artist should be able to adapt to.
Working in a separate viewer sounds like something that would introduce more bugs than necessary. It's more reliable to test assets in the context they're meant to be used in.
@sprunghunt, i agree. i think that is the ideal. for my current project i have the luxury of not having to interface with the editor and don't stress slight changes after an asset is brought into the engine, major issues will be addressed with a polish pass, i have access to the project but am allowed to just send out assets remotely. the team is rather casual about pipeline, favoring low friction and forward momentum, what's in place works, so further refinement is not paramount.
yeah thats the ideal state, but working as an external partner for many years, the reality is. It doesnt always happen, for many many reasons.
So what it needs is a fool proof pipeline that will make sure that whatever one delivers is the best it can be at the stage it is in.
On Halo we didnt even know what the textures would look like, we just delivered the masks to drive them. So the important stuff before that point is knowing that your lowpolies and bakes will be clean in the target engine. Of course this will become complicated once the target engine uses some crude tangentspace. Thankfully most productions by now use MikkT or at least the Maya tangent space, so you can check stuff in Maya or Unreal or other MikkT based Engines. It's not ideal, but you have to make it work, otherwise, yeah it will just introduce needles errors or countless hours on the client side fixing stuff the externals are not able to reproduce.