[Reworked]

I�m beginning a personal website project in an attempt to open up the conceptual design process for artistic assets. The end goal is so that a community of artists can collaborate to develop artwork together in online distributed environments. Places where this may help is in public projects such as open source video games or modifications for commercial video games.

The form the website will take is an open submission process for conceptual design source and preview files based on the original art description and/or other submitted designs. The idea is that because all designs and their source files are publicly available, artists are free to build upon each other�s work and explore possibilities in a non-linear fashion.

Project Goals
-Increase participation leading to better and faster designs
-Specified requirements so work is always moving in the right direction
-Evolutionary design process where each work incorporates the best pieces of prior design proposals

Right now, I�m trying to gather feedback on the idea and to understand the problem better because, at the moment, there are too many assumptions. I would appreciate if people could answer the following questions or provide any general comments.


1. For conceptual and production phases of design, how is the work usually divided? Are subtasks assigned to individuals or to teams?

2. How do you normally organize your files for yourself and for teams?

3. What type of design specifications are you usually given? Do they tend to be short or detailed? Which do you prefer?

4. Have you ever worked in a distributed design team? What tools did you use and how was the experience?

5. Would you donate your time and effort to public and free projects? Are you willing to license your contributions in a manner that allows others to make derivative works?

6. Do you prefer one leader determining the design direction or a more democratic approach?

[sweetums]

Okay, and please explain further why artists should create and upload conceptual efforts for no renumeration, yet subjecting their work to additional alteration by other artists, again for no renumeration, much less creative acknowledgement, with the final result being what, exactly, and for what final purpose???

The word "commercial" implies the exchange of monetary values. No self-respecting individual who loves what they create would willingly throw good efforts your way for some vauge, exploitative endeavor with a possible "commercial" endpoint.

Personally, I think you are wasting your time, and would be better off developing your own marketability, instead of trying to exploit others with the mumbo-jumbo of "increased participation..."

Bottom line, you gotta pay to play, bucko. Artists (as opposed to 'wanna-be's,' who like to draw, but aren't necessarily very good at it) will not freely throw hours of work your way to adapt, add on to, and then provide for "commercial" enterprises.
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Life is short. Expect nothing, enjoy everything.
That which does not kill you should make you wiser...

[Francis]

The open source model is appropriate for things like programming or operating systems, but I'm not so sure it would work as well for conceptual design. The whole point of having a design (let's say "visual development" to differentiate from "game design") stage is to build a coherent world that subscribes to *one* unified vision. If you piecemeal visual development work out to many isolated contributors, you could possibly get cool designs for individual items (cool robot design, or cool castle, etc.) but how do you ensure that design A fits in the same world as design B?

In a normal process, an art director oversees and approves each design iteration as it comes in. The most efficient way for that to happen (at least in my experience) is for an art director to work regularly with a specific concept artist to iterate on a design - this can either be a staff artist or a freelancer. The art director is responsible for making sure that the design fits into the established vision, and that the concept artist has good and useful feedback and direction to iterate on the design. Having random contributors "improving" on the design would require the art director to basically start from scratch with each new concept artist in order to keep the design on track with the vision. Sounds like more work than is necessary.

I understand what you're trying to do, and I know that the open source idea has proven to be effective and efficient, and has a sort of built in quality control and self policing factor. But I think that works in situations where everyone agrees on what works and what does not - for instance, if a program crashes, everyone agrees that it crashes. There are ways to optimize a program and make it more efficient, but something like visual development is more subjective.
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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[Reworked]

Thank you for your feedback and my apologies. There are many commercial video games that are purposefully modifiable by end users. Most of these mods are made freely available such as Red Orchestra (http://www.redorchestra.clanservers.com/) and Urban Terror (http://www.urbanterror.net/). Open source games that I had in mind were projects like Battle for Wesnoth (http://www.wesnoth.org). Why they're giving away their efforts could be as simple as they're helping build a game they want to play.

I'm thinking of building a general purpose tool that solves a niche problem so that is why I mentioned situations where it could be of use. Those kinds of projects may not be of interest to those on this forum but I was hoping for insights on the workflow of professional artists.

[Reworked]

Thanks Francis. You brought up some great points.