We have a new research associate coming into the office today – welcome, Jessica Bueler – and part of her task will be getting some organization around here. As I’ve said before, there are thousands upon thousands of parts to a video game.
One of Jessica’s tasks as she learns her way around the organization will be to go through the many folders of artwork, videos, sound and documents and see what is not used, what is in conflict and what is duplicated.
Our company wiki is somewhat helpful in this regard but it isn’t completely up to date nor perfectly organized either. As Maria pointed out in her last post, being a small company means having to prioritize and sometimes things like a flashy website or documentation are not the first tasks completed.
The map above is just one example of the types of things I’m coming across that we created and intended to use somewhere but have not yet been put into the game. The scene background below is another. I like the since of anticipation it represents, as if something is about to happen.
Maybe we won’t use them at all or will revise them. However, one of her first tasks will be to actually look at all of the stuff we have lying around and decide, just like in spring cleaning, if we want to keep this, toss it or fix it.
It’s actually a good way to to come up to speed quickly on what we are doing here at 7 Generation games, and like with spring cleaning, we hope to come up with some really cool stuff we had forgotten we had.