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I've started down a line of art asset development that will allow me to (hopefully) reuse and improve assets for several games.

But how do I go about storing and finding them?

Let's say for example I decide to focus on RPGs for ~2 years. I would create items, monsters, etc. and store them somewhere. How would I categorize them and make them easier to search later on?

Is the best solution "use directories with broad categories like landscape/items/monsters/etc.?"

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What's wrong with using directories with broad categories?

You can just put more specific categories if you find that you really have too many assets within a directory.

You could just organize it this way:

ArtAssets

which contains:

Landscape -> (only if you have a lot of landscapes) Forest, City, Sky, etc.

Items -> Weapons, Armors, Potions, Miscellaneous, etc.

Characters -> Enemies, Players, NPCs, etc.

I'd say start out with very broad categories and if you find yourself having to search a lot through a category to find an asset, get more specific categories.

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    \$\begingroup\$ The main problem with that is that the directory lends itself to only one kind of organization. Ideally there would be a way to "tag" assets so you can, say, search for anything that's "blue", or "moody" and get stuff across those categories. \$\endgroup\$
    – Tetrad
    Jul 30, 2011 at 18:56
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Tetrad: Oh well, maybe that's because I'm used to having not so much art assets with my games. I never thought such intensive categorization would be required. My bad, I guess there is a program somewhere that can handle that. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jesse Emond
    Jul 30, 2011 at 23:19
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    \$\begingroup\$ This doesn't really scale well. It's really hard to find stuff, even if you know that you have an image of X. \$\endgroup\$
    – ashes999
    Aug 9, 2011 at 22:57
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You can always use a Wordpress installation for it. It has an image gallery, and allows you to upload images and tag/categorize them (if you use one image per post).

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Alienbrain asset manager is a good start.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Pretty pricey. Plus, I want this for 2d assets, not even textures for 3d assets. \$\endgroup\$
    – ashes999
    Aug 9, 2011 at 22:59

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