There be dragons

About six years ago, I worked on a Macintosh game called Shadow of the Dragon http://now4.com/wiredgames/ it was a role playing game in the same vein as Myst.

Figure 1. The hero Blackwood and the Wizard

We had a great artist that was freelancing for us and working offsite most of the time. Being a creative guy, he would work all sorts of crazy hours, which made it hard for us to have regular creative meetings. So he would send us his designs, it’d review them and make suggestions like "make the beast look meaner" or "can the fog in the forest be less dense?" and so on and so forth. He’d go back, redesign them and come up with four or five versions with different levels of fog densities.

Pretty soon, our assets were multiplying like Captain Kirk's Tribbles. -- We had the rendered versions, the BMP version and GIF versions for the website promo etc.

Then our creative director would go through all the thumbnails, preview the finished work and mark them as approved for use. By that time we had eight or nine versions of Orcs, Forest scene, monsters, footstep sound effect, water rushing effects etc.

Figure 2. A scene for the game

Once we narrowed down all the characters, scenes, sound effects etc, I’d start coding.

A few months into coding and playing the game, I realized that the first version of the forest with dense fog was probably better than the one we ended up picking. I kept thinking, that it would have been great if we could have stored all the different version of the forest so that we could go back and review them.

It also became clear that we were not going to be able to use all the creatures that we had designed in this game. But it would have been nice to be able to use them in another game.

That’s the beauty of an asset management system, things can be catalogued, searched, retrieved and archived for future use.

Figure 3. One creature that made it into the game

The Asset Management System