Mechanics in Motion

So you’ve decided you want to make your own video game. Your programming or design skills are good enough to meet or rise to the challenge, and you’ve chosen a game engine or begun creation of one of your own. You are looking forward to a working game, but on the horizon looms the ever approaching matter of the art assets. Maybe you are aware that there is something called the art pipeline, and you know that it’s eventually going to have to be sorted out. Sure there will be some challenges getting the art assets into your game, but that is technical stuff and you can figure it out. Maybe you even wanted to make some custom content, so you download an open source modeling program like Blender. That turned out to be a bit more involved than you expected. Like all technical challenges, you know you can get it figured out, but you are painfully aware that your time would be much better spent elsewhere. You’re not concerned because there are lots of artist out there, and after all, the art just makes it look pretty, the hard work is in the coding, right?

So you decide to get some artists involved. Things start out great­— you generate a lot of hype about your cool new game, get some artists on board everyone is set to go. You have a web site, maybe even some design documentation and a few rules together. The artists are all excited (I’ve heard this called “the creative honeymoon”), and they ask you, “so what do you want modeled?”  Let’s say you are making a high fantasy game, so you tell them to make some medieval fantasy models. A few ask some odd questions, that quite honestly sound a bit like they are overly  worried about specifics, so you assure them to just go ahead and model something (after all, it’s just basic medieval fantasy, everyone knows what that looks like, right?)

A week later, you check back in with the artists and find maybe only one or two of them have done anything. You feel a bit puzzled or maybe even a little irritated, but they are volunteers so you take what you can get. The guys who didn’t do anything ask a bunch more questions or make a bunch of excuses that sound like procrastination. So, you decide to take a look at the models from the artists who did some work. You find that one has made a nice castle that looks pretty good, but seeing some things that need to be changed or adjusted, you helpfully mention this to the artist. Maybe the artist gets a bit defensive about it, but goes off to make the changes you asked for. The second artist modeled a really nice character, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with fantasy— it really looks like something from a wild-west game. You explain this, and he goes off to rework the model.

Next week comes, and the other artists who didn’t do anything the first week still haven’t done much of anything, except for one of them who has made partial progress on a building he wants to show. You tell him it’s good work, keep going (you really want to encourage him along so he will get it done). The other artists have made some modifications to their first models, only the one guy’s castle has totally changed into some bizarre gothic horror thing, and it seems he didn’t make any of the changes you wanted.  The ‘character artist’ now has an even more wild-west looking character. You are somewhat baffled at these people’s inability to follow instructions, and begin what you feel is a totally rational conversation with each artist about what changes need to be made. The discussions do not go well at all— seems like both of these guys are concerned with all sorts of strange overly artistic issues that don’t seem to have anything to do with what you want, which is just to get some basic fantasy models made so you can get them into your game! The conversations worsen, and the next thing you know, one of them has gotten defensive and emotional, and he is making noise about quitting the project.

“What’s up with this guy, you think. What a sensitive and defensive person, he seemed so rational before.”

A few weeks later the other artists who weren’t doing anything still haven’t done anything—except that one guy who is still working on the building, and swears he put 20 hours into it but it looks exactly the same. As the project progresses it seems the artists are missing more and more meetings. The one artist with the castle model has quit, and the other one with the crazy wild-west thing has decided to go work on some other project (though not before thanking you for letting him help and get a nice piece for his portfolio).  Things are not going as well as you had hoped. These artists seem like unreliable, flaky and temperamental people. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at those modeling packs you saw online.

What went wrong here? To really understand it, let’s take a look at an area where you may have more familiarity, coding.  In coding, there are a lot of best practices and rules that have to be followed.  You may have worked with some other coders on a project, so you know just how important it is that everyone uses the same set of standards for their code­. To do otherwise is to invite disaster­— code that doesn’t integrate well, little bugs showing up, inconsistent variable names and spacing that makes code very hard to read, or even greater problems that you as a good coder are all too familiar with. This is very important to you in your new game project— who wants a bunch of hacks working on your project, right? But art doesn’t require that same level of precision and organization it seems. It’s all very open-ended and subjective.  It’s also not even what really makes the game work, so there isn’t the same critical need for consistent standards and best practices, right?

Wrong.

Turns out artists have a work process, just like programmers (or anyone else who is good at what they do). If you are not willing to understand and respect that process, you are not going to get much content out of your artists. The reason they seem so flaky and temperamental is because you are not following anything they recognize as a valid process for creation. How do you think you would react if you were on a programming team, and it was obvious to you that the lead programmer didn’t have any sort of plan, and instead told you to go off coding with only the vaguest of guidelines, only to come back and criticize you for using bad variable names, when he never told you in the first place how he wanted them to be named?  Without any specific instructions, weren’t you just doing what you knew to be the best practices for variable naming?  And what about the fact that you assumed he was coordinating all these separate bits of code so they could be properly integrated, only to find out that when it’s all put together, nothing works in any sort of logical manner, and it’s all full of bugs (if things even work at all)? You think maybe you might throw up your hands in frustration and leave the project?

The underlying issue here is really one of design and planning. For any complex system to work properly, it has to be well planned and well designed.  This is true for making a building, an automobile, a computer program, and even the art assets for a game. Game art has to be thought of as an entire system of harmonious parts that all have to integrate efficiently, consistently and synergistically with the game design itself. Knowing how to do this well is the skill of art direction. Good art direction is essential in every step of the art pipeline.

In the next articles, I’ll cover what steps you can take to improve this process.