Game Art Outsourcing

The games industry is a fast-moving, ever-evolving beast. The release of new consoles and faster computers open up the potential for even more amazing visuals, placing ever-increasing demands on art production. In order to remain an agile and competitive department we've had to force ourselves to become comfortable with looking beyond the hallways of Big Huge for additional art resources. We used outsourcing to a small degree towards the end of development on Rise of Legends. Nearly all of our building LOD's were sent out of house. The team, while initially cautious, seemed quite happy with the end result. LOD work is not the most exciting of tasks and sending it out allowed internal focus to be placed on much more challenging and interesting work. These days our internal 3D artists often approach their work with the mindset of creating the ideal asset (by "ideal" we mean the item every artist, internal or external, looks to emulate when similar assets are produced). Once the ideal asset is complete then a detailed how-to tutorial is assembled to go along with it. Whereas word docs were the norm during Rise of Legends, these days detailed step-by-step videos are our tutorial documentation tool of choice (see earlier post on Camstudio). Videos of the actual software process along with artist narration provide an easy-to-follow template. Each time we bring a new fulltime hire, contractor, or intern up to speed via the video tutorials we save valuable veteran artists bandwidth. Another way to look at it, one 10 minute video viewed by six fellow artists provides the author with an additional hour's worth of production (NOTE: I asked one of our talented programmers to check my math on that last point and it received a thumbs up). I feel confident that talented artists willing and able to effectively communicate their techniques will be the ones that prosper the most as outsourcing gains increased industry momentum. I can certainly see a day where each and every artist in our department has their own external production staff of three to five individuals that they are charged with leading and directing.

Getting back to present day, at the moment we're working on a couple of art asset heavy titles and have increased the range and amount of tasks that we're comfortable seeking external help on. We've had the most success outsourcing items such as lopoly & hipoly modeling, zbrush, texturing, opening cinematics, icons and LOD creation. In order to streamline our contractor approach we've created a couple of new online tools - a contractor application form and message board. Advertising our application form (located at http://www.bighugeconnect.com/) on various websites and industry-related message boards has provided us with a steady stream of game art applicants. I have an outlook folder where the best of the best submissions are culled and sorted by specialty. Whenever we find ourselves spread too thin internally we simply send a few emails out to applicants previously marked as potential outsourcing partners. With their help more often than not we're able to quickly tame most schedule risks. We've also started a detailed log of how successful, or unsuccessful, our working relationships with external vendors have been. This allows us to favor those that seem happy working with us and that we're happy working with. The second piece of tech that we've added is a contractor message board. Once we sign an external artist up he/she is given a user pass and directed to a private, secure thread where their work assignment awaits (often with previously mentioned tutorial video). Contractors are asked to frequently document their progress via daily updates to that same thread. We in turn keep all feedback and direction documented there. Each side receives instant email notifications to any new posts. So far the message board system with email notification has limited one of the biggest dangers of outsourcing - lost production time due to confusion and poor communication. Recently we've also added an online billing tool that sends clear and consistent contractor payment request to our Operations Department. Additionally we're seeking a dedicated Art Outsourcing Manager that will continue driving it all forward.

Added bonuses of becoming more comfortable with outsourcing - team size flexibility along with additional recruitment opportunities. We can quickly increase our team size at will, reducing the need to carry a large art team in between contracts as well as being able to quickly ramp up art bandwidth. That ability is quite nice when suddenly we find ourselves with more work than we can reasonably handle. On the recruitment end we'll often try a potential fulltime candidate out with some initial contract assingments. The candidate gets to try us on while we try them on. If the resulting work is of high quality and communication is smooth on both sides then it's a promising sign that they'll be happy and productive in a fulltime position.

Areas where we haven't been as successful in outsourcing has been in animation and concept development. We've made it a point to increase our internal capabilities by bolstering the ranks in each of these specialties. Having strong internal concepting skills also has the added bonus of constantly fueling the team's excitement via a steady stream of inspiring visuals.

Here's some business cards that we recently printed up in order to further spread the word about our contractor application site (What are you waiting for? Sign on up, we'd love to work with you!)...

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