Entry #6 - Outsource

Last time I wrote, I've mentioned two big problematic areas: map creation and lack of concept arts.

First concepts 

I’m at the stage where I can’t continue any more without focusing heavily on visuals and concepts of the content. The style of characters and objects, their materials and geometry can be pretty good at advising their logic and add a creative spark to designing new mechanics. This time I’ve decided to just use Fiverr to find some contractors that could do concept arts for me. First stage is creating the base character, a simple, blank representative of my tribe. I’ve asked several people about making these concepts, chose two of them and gave them exactly the same assignment. 

One of the contractors asked like 2 questions, gave me a price and 2 weeks deadline. The second one, asked like 10 questions, wanted to know all the details, important and not. Gave me a price that was twice as high and over a month's deadline. The first one did the job. Included all the elements I’d asked for, properly represented the mood and emotions I'd wanted and delivered high quality concepts with variation of several elements (skin color, tattoos patterns etc). The second one failed miserably. I had to constantly remind him of different elements, mood was meh, quality was meh, creativity was meh.  It required a lot of work on my side to search for more and more references, pick up all the mistakes he made and the final result still didn't satisfy me. So I chose the first one. Here is the basic tribesman.

Stage 2

I like working with this concept artist. So I quickly came up with references for the next stage: character portraits. In the game, there will be several characters. All of them work the same, but i want them to have some characteristic traits, portraits, names etc, so that players can have their favorite ones, create some type of emotional relation. While many games would use a character editor exposed to players, that would require a bit too much work from me, plus I'm not really convinced that it would work that well. Sometimes characters invented by devs can have more depth and quality than characters created by players. Especially if there are several of them. The work went very smoothly again, the artist provided even more value than I expected, coming up with some characters’ short descriptions and ui frames to present these portraits nicely. So… Here are the portrait concepts. I think I will need ~6 of them, so I’ve ordered 8. I like them. I won’t use all of them the same way. But I still think they are cool.

Models

After the first concept was ready, I ordered modeling, texturing and rigging of the basic character. It didn’t go well. The guy made some modeling mistakes that he didn't fix even when directly asked, texturing was pretty bad, shapes of tattoos completely different than on the concept art. His attitude quickly got very bad. And finally, he said that he can do rigging as a separate order, even though in messages I said I want the model with rigging. But I forgot to add this in the order form so he kind of had a way to skip it. Lesson for future. I won’t use this model and need to order it from someone else again. Interesting thing is that this 3d artist started the same way as the second concept artist: asking a lot of questions, talking about very unimportant details etc. I kind of feel like it's a small red flag when contractors approach assignments this way. One note about the second concept artist and this 3d artist: I still paid them both, even though I won’t use their work. These were small assignments and when ordering sth from several people I kind of assume that I will ditch some of them. But then again, finding a good contractor has a lot of value for me.

Map

In the last entry, I’ve mentioned issues with map modeling and switching to white boxes approach for quicker prototyping. It kind of works, kind of doesn't. It's super quick but it just… doesn't feel right. Maps are very important in this type of a game, they need to expose all the combat mechanics and nuances, which current map doesn't. I need to think seriously about what to do with these maps. If I want to level up my skills or start working with someone better on this aspect.

Plans

Working with concepts started a new chapter of the development. Now I need to order stuff, integrate stuff, pay for stuff… plan stuff. I also had a bit of a blocker at some point, not really knowing where to go and what to focus on. So I made a short, one page plan to have some general direction and some constraints. It all comes to being able to show the game to the world at the end of June. So in June I want to have a steam page, proper title, enough materials to start promoting the game and a timeline for the first release.