Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Workflow Improvement via
Automatic Asset Tracking
Matt Greene and William Smith
3.1 Introduction
Volition, Inc., is the developer of recent titles
Saints Row 2
and
Red Faction:
Guerrilla
for Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, and PC platforms. Volition
employs over a hundred full-time developers to generate unique content for each of
its simultaneous game projects. Keeping track of game art content for projects at
Volition is an organizationally daunting task. This article describes how Volition's
technical artists built an automated solution to the general problem of asset tracking
for the upcoming cross-platform development project,
Red Faction: Armageddon
.
This chapter details how the task was researched, developed, and how updates and
maintenance were designed to ensure that the system was optimally useful.
3.2 Historical Drawbacks of Manual Asset Tracking
Assets produced at Volition were traditionally tracked by manually cataloging every
object, item, and resource using off-the-shelf spreadsheet solutions such as Microsoft
Excel. As the scope of Volition's game projects expanded, this method of asset
tracking became increasingly time consuming and inecient. In order to determine
a better method for asset tracking, our first step was to identify all drawbacks of
the existing manual method. This exercise would assist in building a set of feature
expectations for an as-yet hypothetical automated solution.
Lack of overall speed was the first obvious negative aspect of manual asset track-
ing. In the past, assets were added to the catalogue slowly or inconsistently and
information was dicult to quickly retrieve. Additionally, it was dicult to track
metadata information such as polygon count, texture information, material prop-
erties, or memory footprint. It was nearly impossible to perform a specific search
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