How can you work with game developers and artists?

Remember that every member of a Game Team is an Artist, no matter their discipline. Engineers, Game Designers, Artists, Animators and Producers are all Creators. This means that their ego is, by necessity, bound to their work product. A criticism of an Artist's work is often treated as a personal attack. Be patient and kind with each other, even if you don't feel it. It doesn't cost you anything and it just might save your project.

This can be done by having a clear and coherent documents. Scope and visions are captured in Game Design Documents(GDD). These GDDs are live documents and are bible for the game project. Having a clear, exhaustive list of core loop, features, systems help everyone being on the same place. One can also add reference images, ideas and shared goal for each of these features and their attributes. Many a times, people find one or the other format for writing or keeping these GDDs. You may have a google document or any other cloud word document. Other option can be to follow wiki format for it. Wikis help in more structured way and also benefits most in new updates. You may decide based on your and team's familiarity as everyone will contribute.

We should always start with understanding our target audience, no matter what kind of vision we have for our game, it will be tailored eventually towards our audience's needs. Only looking at existing GDDs might not be enough, since it's telling you what has been designed, but it may not tell you what will be changed. Always think through GDDs and pretending you are thr target audience, what will you react and will you like each details. Then you will be able to clearly understand why current vision of the game makes sense, and of course you will be able to know which part of scope is supporting the vision the most. Priority is key to our job, knowing audience will help you to see the vision & justify priority over the scope.

It's also important to establish expectations around scope, schedule and budget. You'll need to determine what can realistically be achieved within the available time frame and budget to avoid feature creep and scope changes mid-project.

Scope is going to be wrong. Have a rough guess at, recognize it's going to be wrong, and move on. When it comes to vision, know what you believe will set your game apart. Games have a very high failure rate and are for disposable time. They compete with books, streaming services, sporting events (in person or not), hobbies, social media, and of course all the other games. Do you have an idea of why a real player audience will play your game instead of engaging with all the other things? Who is that audience? What do they like right now? How will your game attract them? Have a lot of conversations with your team about vision. Collaborate around it. Early on, pretend you are the audience. You have to believe people will engage.

Due diligence the tools and opt for in-house solutions if the external tools would limit you from realizing the core value proposition of your game. IKEA has the principle of Fixed, Flexible and Free. You can adopt this for greater alignment at your studio. Communication tools for example are good to be fixed, so from team to team they are shared. Game engines should be at flexible category, so there will not be a limitation on the creative vision of a game product but the studio states some recommendations to gain a competitive edge with modular coding practices. There is a lot to gain, when different projects build a shared code base of common game functions. Strategically least significant choices can be completely free to choose.

Some examples of commonly used game development tools: Game Engines: Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, CryEngine Editors: Visual Studio, Xcode, GameMaker Studio Graphics: Photoshop, Illustrator, Blender Audio: Audacity, FL Studio, Pro Tools Version Control: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket Project Management: Trello, Jira, Asana Communication: Slack, Discord, Teams Testing: Unity Test Tools, Xcode Instruments, TestComplete The key factors for choosing tools are game genre, platforms, budget, skills, and compatibility between tools. Updates and security are also important.

Treat your devs like the experts they are. If you need tools, ask them what they use and know. Talk about alternatives. Figure out what they are willing to do if the premier options cost too much and you need to go with something else. When you are picking tools, engines, and etc. you are choosing what your team is going to be working with every single day. Involve them. Let them have a huge voice in this. Talk about the financial challenges if they exist. Essentially, treat them as adults who can make good decisions for themselves, their work, the company, and the players. If you treat them like professional adult experts, they are likely to show up as professional adult experts. And that's really what you want.

Here are some key tips: ? Define roles and responsibilities clearly. ? Plan production process from concept to release in milestones. ? Standardise naming conventions and file organisation. ? Optimise asset hand-offs between teams. ? Establish review/approval processes with versioning. ? Automate repetitive tasks where possible. ? Integrate version control, project management and issues tracking. ? Regularly test and improve pipeline efficiency over time. ? Document workflow in a guide to onboard new hires consistently. ? Hold regular workflow discussions to surface issues and improvements.

I can't emphasize this enough: talk to the experts you have hired about what this should look like. Yes, you might broadly know that a piece of content pipeline is roughly: concept->model->rigging->anim->VFX->audio->QA. That's fine. But all the details your team knows. The way narrative goes from idea to storyboard to draft to copy edit, etc. all of this has implications that your experts will know about. Even if they are relatively inexperienced, you want them contributing to the conversation so they are invested in it working. Once it's up, now you can start looking at it and seeing where bottlenecks emerge, where things aren't happening that should be, and start helping them to make it work.

Big thing here: Know who the decision-makers are. Consensus-based (we all agree) decision-making is a disaster. Democracy (majority) is also not great. Have someone who you can look to to make calls in various spaces. If that's process or culture, maybe it's the EP. If that's style guide or visual hierarchy, have an art lead/director. If that's technical, know who your engineering leader(s) are. The idea isn't to hand authority to a few people and ignore the teams. But it is to create a mechanism for decisions and forward movement when things get stuck. People will disagree, that's ok. As long as we stay moving towards the game's vision together, and are willing to disagree and commit, we can still make great games.

Use Jira, Trello, MeisterTask or another virtual task management system to boost knowledge sharing across the different roles. This also ensures that each task has a clear owner and makes it visible, when a task has no owner. Feedback giving should be normalized to the extent, where everyone feels appreciated and understands that constructive feedback coming from different backgrounds is highly valuable. It ensures that the end result is ready for the global audience.

Collaborate closely with artists, designers, and engineers by effectively communicating in their respective domains. By grasping their needs and challenges, you can foster a synergy that results in remarkable outcomes. For instance, engineers can gain profound insights into artists' and designers' visions, harnessing their expertise to develop technology and tools that amplify content creation capabilities. This not only boosts productivity but also ignites newfound inspiration, enabling them to achieve what they once considered impossible. Likewise, designers and artists can express their goals, enabling the engineering team to pioneer tech breakthroughs or experiments that deliver desired outcomes.

Communication between design and art is important, especially with level design! Believe it or not, that block-out that you created and even though you can fully picture all the details in your head, does not look the same to everybody else! They see different things in their heads. It’s is important to retain cross-discipline communication to ensure that any intent behind design remains in place yet also to make sure that the other’s teams understand all that is needed about the design. This will allow the art team to at the level in a way which is more aligned with design but it also goes both ways! The art team will also have their suggestions for what to include which will in tern influence the design. You’re making a game TOGETHER!

When communicating with artist showing, is ALWAYS better than saying. Communicating purely with text in a creative field will most likely lead to more confusion. Either due to a lack of detail or too much detail. So when you can, use images or drawings to convey what you are trying to communicate. Also consider annotating these image with arrows or circles if you are referring to a specific part or section of the image. This can be done easily with Window's default picture viewer. Additionally if you need to capture a screenshot, (Windows) + Shift + S is the easiest way I have found to do so.

According to Literature Nobelist George Bernard Shaw "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place". I came across this quote last Summer in Stockholm's Nobel Museum and it has been on the back of my mind ever since. We often make assumptions that communication has happened, but how certain are we? While effective and frequent communication is important, equally if not even more important is ensuring that action points, feature owners and key documentation is collectively understood across the whole team.

When communicating with Artists and Designers, be as detailed as possible. JIRA items were often sent back to me berceuse I wasn't specific enough about what I was asking for. A good rule of thumb to mitigate a lack of detail is to show rather than say. Windows PCs already has built in tools for this called the "Snipping Tool". This tool will allow you to screenshot then annotate anything on your desktop. By adding these screen shots, and annotating when possible, you will be showing in addition to saying. Which will cut down on confusion and make communications a lot clearer.

Speak their language. You don't need to go back to school for an art or music degree, but watch a couple YouTube videos and learn some basic terms. Ie, what's the difference between hue and value? If you don't know the correct terminology, the best thing you can do is give examples. Show your artist a style you like, make a color palette for them in Canva. If you're commissioning a composer, send them songs and other materials for inspiration. Show stuff you DON'T want too, it's very helpful! You're trusting their skills and judgment. If you can't, better hope you have an anomaly like Stardew Valley doing literally everything.

Game dev is hard. It's a hits-based industry with a less than 1 in 20 success rate. There are a ton of games out there already, and more being developed every day. Working with game devs, be they artists, engineers, QA, designers, narrative, audio, or whoever else is to work with people who have accepted those odds. To make a successful game, every piece needs to be present, but the whole must always take priority over each individual craft. What we do in game dev is distinct from software dev or movies. The more you can hold a vision and align everyone to it, the better off you'll be. Remember, you won't get everything done. You just have to get enough done. Help your team understand that, and it'll help the most important work finish.

Game dev is multidisciplinary so it's important to have an understanding of all fields involved. A programmer will almost always set unreasonable deadlines if asked about the timeframe for a feature. Because game development is one of the hardest parts of programming. Multiply their expected deadline by 1.5x or 2x to get a good outcome. A designer will get burned out easily under pressure and will need some recharge time to clear their head. Design and art are soul draining activities. Ask designers how their mental resources are from time to time to keep on track with their burnout cycle. Knowing the pitfalls of each profession is vital to keep everyone in a healthy work environment.

One thing that is an issue that I have seen in my career is be sure that everyone can get career fulfillment, not just a job with a paycheck. Be sure to enable each discipline to work towards something they can feel proud of and be sure that they all understand this. Allow design to make great a stories and gameplay, allow art to make portfolio ready pieces, allow engineering to create noteworthy systems, allow Q/A to create smooth processes to actually 'assure the quality'. You will find if everyone understands and is enabled to sometimes get some wins like these your team will gel and their potential will be realized.

I’d like to address the topic question. Artist are game developers. While in development ideas and feedback can come from up and down a spectrum of disciplines. While involvement in design is usually based on the individual artists interest in expanding their knowledge in game development. However, cross-discipline roles such as world building and level design are also crucial to bring life to the game being developed. These roles require invaluable skills that help create a cohesive and engaging gaming experience.