There is an old saying about playing chess, “a good player will think three moves ahead while a great player thinks one move ahead, but each move is the right move.” I’m not much of a chess player, but I think I know what this means. I have worked in the games industry for a very long time and in that time, seen all manner and combinations of circumstances, many times over. I enjoy telling stories and problem solving, and art outsourcing has some of the most interesting problems to solve, but it isn’t a mystery. All the moves are known variables and it’s not as if there are an uncountable amount of them, it only feels that way.

I’m not sure there is even a portfolio template for an art outsourcing manager, but I wanted to at least share thoughts on how I would approach things. This page is an effort to demostrate my gained experience about being an art outsourcing manager/director.

So, please take this for what it is, the opinion of a lone director, sharing some bit of information by saying the quiet things out loud. I hope you will find it useful to your project.

Guidelines

For CLIENT side Directors, Executive Producers, CEO’s or Founders, anyone with decision making ability, please consider these points.

• Hire an Art Outsource Manager much earlier than you think and pay them whatever they want.
  Outsourcing is now an integral part of game production and yet it is commonly overlooked or dealt with much later. Having someone on board to manage all the connections and relationships with external teams at an early stage will lay a strong foundation for what’s to come.

• Communication is key.
  Communication, of course, is immensely important. Get any group of people bigger than two and trying to coordinate anything gets expotentially harder. It’s a no-brainer. Communcation is key, but it’s been my experience that most of the time, it’s not handled as well as it could. Reasons?

  • 1st reason: “Everyone is incredibly busy”

  • 2nd reason: “Things are changing all the time”

  Information is the life blood of any project with thousands of moving parts and proper method/tool the heart. Each studio in a way is writing their own production book and in order to write a book, you need writers. Everyone in the studio are the writers, so really all you need is an “Editor”.

• Don’t make the Art Leads handle outsourcing.
  It’s a common set up. Make the Leads handle outsourcing review. I get the logic, Art Leads are very experienced so they can help out with outsourcing.
  This is a bad idea and here’s why:

  • Art Leads hate it. Haven’t met one who actually enjoys doing it. They’ll be accommodating, but deep down, they’ll think, “I didn’t aspire to reach this position to do outsourcing”

  • The rational, “It shouldn’t take up too much time” is pretty much false. Outsourcing responsibilities can require around 80% of an Art Lead’s time and that leaves very little to actually do Art Lead stuff. Plus, it will burn them out quickly.

  • The other rational is to have each artist on the team take turns, this is also a bad idea. Dealing with external submissions requires a steady consistent control. Dispersing to multiple artists will cause each artist to have their own take on what constitutes a good asset from a bad one and it will confuse the external team.

• Diversify the External Teams.
  It’s difficult to find that “one” external vendor who can do everything you need thenm to do and even if you have found that “one”, it’s not recommended to put all your eggs in one basket. The goal is to have uninterrupted production and a studio can shut down for any reasons like, holidays, power outages, or a pandemic. By setting up multiple external teams in different countries, chances are high that if one shuts down, the other will continue working.

• Use the right tools.
  ”The right tool for the right job”. A project can suffer from going with the wrong tool. What are the criteria for choosing the right tool? You know you’ve chosen the correct one when they meet some of the key descriptive criteria like “professional level”, “robust”, “flexible”, “scale-able”. If you have descripters coming at you like “too rigid”, “bloated”, “slow”, “pain in the ass to use”, then it may be that your project is not using the right tool for the job.

  Recently, I encountered a project that suffered from choosing the wrong tool for outsourcing and the reason they chose it was because the Associate Art Director wasn’t aware of any alternatives. She went with what she knew and it ended up costing them quite a bit of confustion, but worse, the whole system became depended on her and how she organized the information.

  In the gaming industry it’s very observable that there are distinct personality differences between developers, designers and artists. For this reason, when it comes to custom tools, make sure the tool’s user-ability reflect these differences. Making a tool “developer-centric” when its intended for artists may not be the best way to go.

• Provide a validation checking tool.
  Invest in a developer’s time to create a “checker” or “validation” tool that the external artists can use. There are art related conversation like color balance, style, or any visual related topics, and there are “knuckle-head” conversations like bad polys, flipped normals, or holes, plus a dozen more things that can be wrong with a model. Unfortunately, the knuckle-head issues tend to overburden the art conversations and it ends up taking more time dealing with pointing them out in the review stage. Providing a tool to specifically check for project specific issues frees up the conversations to be more about actual art and not about how it’s made.+

• Form a review team.
  If the amount of reviews surpasses the number a single Art Outsource Manager can handle then it may be good to form a “review team”. The most common approach is to have the Art Leads help out with this and I don’t recommend this. (Please refer to “Don’t make the Art Leads handle outsourcing” section.) My recommendation is to hire entry level artists for the sole purpose to review submissions and here are the reasons why:

  • As mentioned earlier, Art Leads and internal artists don’t want to do it and if you make them do it, they will think and feel it is a kind of “bait and switch” of their positions. However, if you hire entry level artists who already knows that’s why they are being hired, they will be excited to do it.

  • The repetition of reviewing outsource work will sharpen an entry artist’s eye and critical thinking more quickly than the normal way an entry artist makes personal improvements as a game artist.

  • Entry Level Artists are much cheaper to use for reviews compared to seasoned pro’s. You can probably hire two for the cost of one.

  • One caveat: To use Entry Level Artists effectively requires a thorough and comprehensive documentation to show them what to look for, preferably a self-guiding training system.

• Allow for external art guideline documentation.
  And speaking of documentation, nobody loves documenting, but allowing for proper time to do it is crucial. And it can’t be done by just anyone. Some of the best experts in their area are not necessarily the best person to document. Just because you know a lot doesn’t mean you can communicate well. You need someone who is great at taking complex ideas and communicating them into much simpler bite sized bits of information. Plus, it needs to be communicated to people of different culture and language, so, more images than words which means time consuming screenshots are needed to get the point across.

• Make and maintain an Asset Library.
  Having an asset library is a great idea because its a incredible time and cost saving measure and yet, it also is a commonly overlooked measure. In the simplest form, an archived directory, will help, but when a more advanced custom tool is created, it will change the way artists and designers are able to create. A tool like an “asset portal” in Maya or Unreal will allow anyone to search and pull assets into the world.

• Build up a reference library.
  A reference library is different from an asset library. It’s more of a resource library to help artist better understand the science like oxidation, water erosion, wind abrasion, and structural stresses from gravity. In general, most game artists are young and being young, they are not the best observers of the world around them yet. Artists need an inquisitive spirit and plenty of time to learn how interactive wear and universal forces converge to tell a story and young artists are unlikely to have that knowledge. Not to say that older artists are better, but it takes a certain kind of mind to understand all the motives involved on why a thing looks like the way it does. Where an inexperienced artist will likely apply wear and tear without considerations, an experienced one will consider the asset’s history like what type of forces it has been exposed to, how long it has been exposed to them and how well it’s been taken care of. I recommend getting as much time-lapsed video footage of how different types of materials decay.

• Allow people to fail fast.
  Failing is not a loss, it’s a gain. Failure is unavoidable and it’s far more productive to fail fast then to drag it on for no reason.

For SERVICE side Owners, Founders and CEO’s of external outsourcing studios, anyone with decision making ability, please consider these points.

• First submission Approvals.
  This means that the team has understood and executed the instructions so well that there is no need for feedbacks other than to approve the work. It is rare, but not impossible to set up a workflow that hits more first submission approvals than not. There are no mysteries left to discover when it comes to game production workflow. Everything in it are all known variables. It’s just a matter of balancing the pillars to make the machine hum. Here are some topics to consider.

• Build a stronger QA process.
  Every industry that has a need for regulations but then regulates themselves have always been ineffective. QA for outsourcing studios is just like this set up. I’ve been given assurances, many times, even by large studios, that the QA process is being handled well and then getting work contrary to those assurances. Like Internal Affairs for law enforcement, the QA team needs to be a separate entity operating within the studio system serving the clients interests above the studios. QA people should have the same abilities as the client side reviewers. Every project I’ve ever worked on, I prefer to work closely with the QA Lead as well as the Art Lead and I find that the quality of the review submissions go up. In fact, my recommendation is to hire older game artists. Old game artists are finding it difficult to find jobs at game companies, but they have all this overwhelming experience. Hire that person and let them work remotely. Pass every piece of work through them before submitting to the client. QA should be the star of the show. Nothing should pass through unless QA approves it.

• Critical thinking.
  When I talk with client side art managers, directors, leads or anyone working directly with outsourcing studios, and ask them what they think is the most pressing issue facing their project they all express a common issue. They wish the external art teams would work with better “critical thinking” abilities:

  • Be aware of what you are making - I think we can all agree that if we don’t understand what we are making, it makes it harder to make it. And yet, we expect people who are, in most cases, so culturally different to make things they have never seen before. This is the challenge, but without proper research that would hinder anyone to make it well.

  • Able to spot things when they are wrong - You can’t spot wrong things if you don’t first understand why its wrong. It’s a bit like the “chicken and the egg” question. And you can’t understand why something is wrong without having a studio culture that promotes collaborative questioning. Critical thinking is asking the right questions at the right time so that the work can move forward in the right way. That has to come from an artist who is able and allowed to do this with proper support. That is how people improve to becoming better problem solvers.

  • The client isn’t always right - I can’t speak for all clients, but if I were able to, I think they would all agree that even though an outsourcing studio is hired on to help, the relationship has always been that of a collaboration. And in the collaborative spirit, the client can’t be right at all times. In some cases, the client doesn’t really know how to go about it, therefore, regardless of how prepared the client is, it’s good to develop an “evaluation” process that examines the common health levels of any prospective project.

  • A Self-Guided Critical Thinking Learning System - This sounds more complicated than it really is. The main idea is to comprise a hierarchy of questions combined with sets of instructions. The challenge is that it takes a bit of time to develop, but once it is, the benefits would be well worth the effort.

• Guessing can cause re-work.
  When you review outsource work for a long time you start to notice certain patterns as to why an asset doesn’t looks correct. One giveaway are signs of incorrect guess work due to improper or no research. The need to gather prep work before starting any work is crucial and yet an underestimated part of outsourcing. The rational is that people are really busy, but if you were able to do a survey among clients, all of them would say that the time spent on gathering proper research is preferred over the cost and time spent on re-work.

• Build up a reference library.
  Please refer to the same bullet point in the Client section. This also applies to external studios.

• Making Environment Levels is the third rail and that is where all the power comes from.
  I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s really hard to find external teams that can “build worlds”. Though, if I were to guess, I would say it’s because external teams typically don’t have much experience with world building. It’s a bit of a quandary to be sure. In order to have experience world building you first need to actually work on world building projects and you can’t secure those projects without demonstrating amazing world building abilities. Ask any decision maker how they decide on selecting external teams and they most likely will say, “we look for work that ‘wows’ us”. So it begs the question, how is there NOT an incredible amount of amazing environment levels available to view in marketplaces? And I get it. There is an internal costs to make them. To that I would say, for a prospective client, there is no demonstration more compelling than the ability to see and move around an amazing level that the team has made. That team would get my business.

• Share tracking data.
  Assuming that the client has the foresight to use Jira and allow access to the external management team, whether the client directly makes a request for it or not, offer to update the production data directly into each jira asset ticket. Updating any track-able data like, “how long did each asset take to complete?” or “how long did each stage work take to complete?” will help you increase your business by helping the client use the data for future projection budgets. These numbers will allow the client manager to graph them out which will in turn help present the progress to directors. So, it is in the interests of the external studio to provide these numbers so that the data can be looked at in real-time.

• Iteration vs Scope Change.
  Keep track of what is iteration and what is scope change. For clarity purposes, “iteration” is additional work under any circumstances where the external team is at fault and “scope change” is additional work due to changes made by the client after the face. Scope change incurs additional cost to make that change and iteration should not incur additional cost. It is not the responsibility of the client to fund the training of an external artists, but rather, an external artist is required to produce work at a expected professional level and deliver on time. As the work progresses, its better to stay on top of what is iteration vs scope change and keep track of how often it is happening as they occur.

• A Geopolitical Reality.
  If I were able to meet my younger self and say that someday I would live in Russia and Vietnam, former enemies of the United States, I would have never believed such a fantastic story. Without getting too deep into it, living and working in these remarkable countries has been and continues to be life altering. In the USA, where independence and individualism is highly valued, a representative government has influenced its people to work in a way where free expressions are not only encouraged but also expected. In contrast, the countries where the bulk of external teams resides have a deep history with centralized authority where a position of strength is valued and the team expects the work to be dictated to them, which to be perfectly honest, may explain the difficulty with critical training. But these two primary differences, “outer-in” versus “inner-out” continues to be one of the main challenge to bridge.

• Saying “yes” must mean “yes”.
  I’m not aware if there is a word to describe this universal behavior. It transcribes across all cultures and it’s not just specific to our games industry. Other industries suffer from the same issue. My guess is that its rooted within us all not to appear weak and say we understand rather than admit we don’t. Many of you who have dealt with outsourcing may be breathing an agreeable sigh right about now. Sure, clients care about the outcome, but they also care a great deal about how that outcome is achieved. They would prefer to take the time to make sure their expectations are understood. The consequence of a misunderstanding is wasted time, effort, and cost that could easily have been avoided.

• The Language Gap.
  On a day-to-day basis, most fires that pop up and need putting out has to do with a misunderstanding. When you look at the format of a typical external team from a non-English speaking country, there seems to be a kind of template where the main Producer or Production Manager is the fluent English speaker and there is a 50/50 chance the Art Director or Art Lead are also fluent and even less of a chance the QA Lead or any of the artist are. And then when the production starts, the day-to-day gets handed off to a younger Producer Assistant who may or may not speak English well. In the end, artist communicate better with artist. Producer to Producer, QA with QA and Director to Director. It’s not surprising to say, like-minded people communicate better with each other, but if language becomes an issue, it certainly raises the level of complexity and that is certainly true if I’m forced to funnel all my concerns through the producer because that person is the only one on the team who knows English. If I have car troubles, I would certainly want to talk directly with the mechanic and not the receptionist.