Managing Assets – Part 2: Setting Naming Conventions

I'm Maria, the Associate Producer for Total Eclipse, a game development studio based in Thessaloniki, Greece.  This is the second part of the “Managing Assets” series of posts and deals with asset naming. If you are looking for the first part, on asset quality, you can find it here.

[This article was originally published in the Total Eclipse blog]

Asset Management - Part 2: Setting Naming Conventions

More...

Use self-descriptive names

The rule of thumb is that from the name one can understand what the item is.  When I say ‘one’ it does not mean you who created and will name the file, but anyone in the team who might make use of, or need to reference it, either now or in the future.

For example, the filename “bigboss1.obj” is not very descriptive, while "final_boss_lvl_01.obj" is surely better.

In Maya’s Dress Up we use the term Garment to denote anything that Maya might wear. This can range from a different hairstyle to dresses or a bracelet.  The garment assets are saved in a directory structure like:

When we began work on the game, a garment was identified by its full path, for example the ID for a set of crimson fur gloves would be “Wardrobe/Accessories/Gloves/Fur_Crimson”

Some time after release, we realised that this was not efficient and we decided to use the filename as an identifier.  This created issues as we now had duplicate filename issues as:

Our mistake was that the name was not self-descriptive. We did not lay out a future-proof naming convention for the garments, while we did pay serious attention to colour naming. After discussions, the following convention was used:

(material i.e. velvet)+ (style i.e. Tank) + (subtype i.e. cropped or sleeveless) + (type i.e. top or pants) +colour

Now, valid garment names would be something descriptive, such as OvalBuckleBelt or SuedeJacket.

Not all of the elements had to be used simultaneously, but the end name had to be descriptive.

Once this was done, the whole wardrobe had to be properly renamed – and unfortunately, this escalated to:

So, we certainly did learn a lot from this and we hope by explaining it, it will help you to avoid such a scenario. Plan forward and see what might work for your game to avoid extra costly (and perhaps boring!) work.

Enforce the rules kindly but firmly

If you have rules about how you want things named in your projects, tell the asset creators first. Don’t assume they will know what you want without you telling them so.  Psionic ("mind-reading" for those of you without a D&D disposition) powers are not out yet.

Give clear instructions, and explain why things have to be named in such a way. Explain to them that Box01 or Layer9 will simply not do.  Make the artists part of the whole asset processing cycle and describe what happens to the art after it leaves their hands. A good artist will immediately see your point. Doing the opposite negatively affects teamwork.

After the naming incident, we created a set of guidelines for the artists here in Total Eclipse. In it we say something like:

[procedure steps described for exporting stuff for iOS]

Our guidelines then contain guidelines like:

If you don’t want to pressure the artist, or if you are the sole creator and really can’t bother, think about this:

Five years down the line you want to re-export the assets for a new device but a) the artist has left or b) you haven’t opened the PSD in said 5 years. You will have frankly no idea what is layer 56 and Group 2.

Scripts are your friends

Enforcing naming conventions is one thing but checking that they are being followed is another one entirely. One obviously cannot be expected to look at layers or directory files one by one.

In certain cases, like with PSD files, we are using Photoshop scripting to check things for us. The script loads a text file with the correct file names and checks it against the PSD. If any layer is named differently or is not found, the script gives an alert. Check out PS-Scripts for a similar source. The site is a treasure-cove for Photoshop scripting .

Some things to watch out for when dealing with text files.

Another thing you might need to do is recursively rename files spread on different directories. If you have a Windows system, DOS batch scripting is a really useful (albeit sometimes frustrating) tool to work with. You can have conditional and nested statements making it a powerful tool. This site has a good overview and examples of commands. I am sure Mac OS X's automator does something similar but I've never used it.

Archive for the future

When an asset is created it usually goes through many iterations (or revisions) until the end result. Naming those revisions sensibly is also very important. You can use numbers, dates, or the alphabet to indicate sequence, such as final_boss_lvl_01_rev.A.obj; whatever works for you, really. Remember, however, to always, always, indicate clearly what is the final product that was used in the game. Have the word FINAL attached, move it into an IN-GAME directory, but make sure the distinction is clear. You will need to use those assets again and if you can't tell which file holds the rough sketch from the end result you're looking for trouble! :)

Conclusion

Everything in this post boils down to this:

It is a small investment that will pay off and save you big headaches in the long-term.

Well, this ends the second part of the Managing Assets series. I hope you enjoyed it, as always comments are welcome!