Pluto написалSunWuKong написал
As a comparison we do a similar thing in Photoshop - all similar items are stored in one PSD versus several.
-Tim
I'm quite curious and I would really appreciate if you touched a bit on why that workflow is beneficial to your production.
Simply curious. 🙂
In Photoshop? I'm guessing that since you quoted the Photoshop part. The thinking is similar for Spine files though.
The deal is this. We have a lot of little fiddly items in the game that are interchangeable and expected to work with other items. An example might be hats or armor for characters. When it is reasonable and possible we put all the similar items in the same file. The thinking is we can reference things against each other for scale and consistency. If we are talking about Spine this might mean animation timings, movement, and making sure things like attachment points match up.
I'm not making any statement this is useful for every team but for us it works quite well and we are regularly able to do quick edits and check things against prior work without opening multiple files. In Photoshop or Spine we simply hide things we don't use. Here's an example from one of our dev blogs on how hats are setup.
Setting things up - Group similar items:
If you have a collection of similar items (we have a collection of player guns, player hats and bosses that get grouped together) your best bet it to put them all in the same Photoshop file. Saves a huge amount of time and makes the work a lot easier than having 200 little .PSD’s all over the place. This is a shot of our allHatsFile.psd. You can see we store 100’s of hats in one file.
(sample of our hat working file)
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Work on things in batches if possible.
If you are perhaps making guns for your main character, you would benefit from making all the same types at the same time. They reason for this is you end up saving design time since you are laying out all your ideas at the same time. The avoids pattern repetition, as well as mistakes and lets you focus on the creative but putting all similar ideas in front at the same time. It’s much easier to see outliers and weird things when you have a nice lineup going.
(sample of our guns which were drawn in batches)
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Some other thoughts
Clearly this system works best when fewer people need to touch similar assets at the same time. If you have a team where multiple people need access to the same types of art or Spine files then this method is probably a non-starter. For a small dev team with maybe one of two people hammering on the art then this may be a nice consolidation of hundreds of files. Your mileage will vary.
Hope that helped. More questions welcomed!
-Tim
