Another great tool for team management is Trello. If you haven’t heard of it I highly suggest you check it out. It is essentially an advanced to-do list. You can assign team members to tasks, set due dates, attach files and screenshots, and leave comments and feedback. It’s seriously great. Even if you work alone it is perfect for keeping yourself on task.

Managing Assets

When I tell people I make video games in my free time I highly doubt they picture me spending 4 hours on a Saturday night converting image formats and adding new filename prefixes. But that’s exactly what happens more often than many developers would care to admit.

The allure of quickly throwing assets into your game “just to see how they look” can be strong, but you must resist the urge. Haphazardly importing BigAwesomeRock_07, MoreBigAwesomeRock_07_new, and SeriouslyThisIsTheFinalBigAwesomeRock_07_morenew will turn your folder structure into a wasteland of assets that have you scratching your head. Sometimes I wonder what the ratio of asset production to asset management is, but I know it’s much higher than most people think (or at least it should be). I spend a lot of time ensuring that there are backups of all our files and that all those files are properly labeled according to our naming conventions (which are conveniently available for reference in a Google doc).

When an asset is finally imported into the game I make sure that it has been properly checked for quality and conforms to our import settings for scale, etc. On the (hopefully rare) occasion that an in-game asset needs to be replaced it’s a good idea to make sure that both the old and new versions are backed up in a separate folder. Once the new version of the asset is imported into your game’s working project folder you want to be sure and delete the old file so that you never use the incorrect version by mistake. It will always be in your backup files if you need to return to it.

This process of keeping your game assets properly organized can be tedious and extremely repetitive, but in the end you will be glad you had the forethought. You might have a firm mental grasp on your folder structure when your game only has a few dozen assets, but before you know it you will be swimming in hundreds of messy files.