\t\t\t\tWith 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
I’m not unhappy about how things turned out, I just thought it could have been better.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakkar.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}