With only two weeks left of funding on this project it’s now clear that my discovery of and subsequent decision to hire an overseas art-team was a mixed blessing.
On the positive side they are extremely cheap for the size of the team I hired. They try to do a good job. By hiring through a company I don’t have to manage individuals on a day to day basis. On certain tasks, such as drawing textures, or modeling objects when there are no technical requirements things worked well.
On the negative side, all games have technical requirements for art assets, and mine more than most. Trying to communicate and enforce these requirements was a constant major time loss on both sides. About 50% of the total time on art development with this company was either lost completely on unusable assets, or spent redoing work. I don’t think they did things wrong out of a lack of care, or of intentional sloppiness. It’s more like artists are very visual, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to follow written instructions without messing up a few times first.
I had to go in and do probably 1/4 of the total art development myself. For example, I knew it was hopeless to try to get the artists to setup physics when after 6 months they still don’t know how to center models correctly, or to reset transforms.. I probably spent a month in total doing work inside Photoshop or the 3D modeling program. This is a good part of the reason why the programming is late. Things look OK, but not half as good as I originally envisioned.
In the end I think I got what I paid for. 1/4 of the value I would have gotten from artists on-site, but 1/4 of the cost too. If I could do things over again, I would have hired on-site artists, and used off-site artists only for gross work with no technical requirements, or requirements that are already visually represented (such as concepts).
I’m not unhappy about how things turned out, I just thought it could have been better.