From the outset, I wanted to be extremely mindful of what I call “creative friction”, which is the opposite of momentum. Creative friction comes from anything that makes it easy for me to not work; disorganization, life stuff, even having Facebook open on another monitor. The more things that have to be fixed or put into place before I start working, the less likely I am to start working, and the more the friction builds up and pushes against progress until it kills the project. One thing I’ve focused on a ton in my OWHQ project is reducing creative friction as much as possible through good project management practices like writing down and following a proper workflow pipeline and setting up my project’s organization and folders ahead of time in logical, clean ways. So far it’s been paying dividends: I’ve minimized the time I spend trying to find files or fix errors, and when things do distract me and kill a day, it’s much smoother to jump back in to my work.

Additionally, I feel that being aware of what goes into creating aspects of the project in other departments only makes me a better production artist. I call this having a full pipeline mindset in your work. When I first started as an intern, I would get a task, I would perform that task, and then I would hand the result off to my mentor or art director and then get a new task. This is fine for an intern, but as I progressed, I started to collect as much information as I could about what other departments were doing. I eventually learned what happened to my assets after I handed them off and actually learned how to take my assets several steps further than I was expected. I learned how to trace the path of my art from my workstation all the way to integration within the game. Most importantly, I also learned where my decisions impacted the lives and workloads of other people down the pipeline. Eventually, I felt that I had just clear enough a picture of what the broader consequences of my creative decisions would be. Do I put text in this texture? That will have to pass through legal and localization. It’s likely to get changed or cut. How can I design around this? If I model and texture a digital readout into this machine does that have to go through a designer to give it functionality? Rigging to animate it? FX to make it prettier? Sound to support it? How many bugs will all of these moving parts create? Is the bang for the buck worth it? Who do I have to talk to or inform? I stepped on several toes in my career before I wised up to this butterfly effect, but these were lessons well learned. Since then I try to be mindful of and to dabble in multiple disciplines.