How do you manage shared assets and tools across a team and projects?

Question

As my team grows I'm trying to better manage shared assets in an organized way across the team. These assets include:

• Brushes and Alphas for Substance, Blender, Krita, etc
• Custom Plugins for Maya
• Trim Sheets and tiling textures
• Reference meshes and images
• Useful configs for content creation softwares that maintain consistency and adherence to our asset policies
• In-House tooling that simplifies certain workflows
• ... and so much more...

The nature of these assets is that they're not tied to any specific programs and all have their own structures. As such, it's not enough to just integrate with an existing engine's marketplace.

These are assets that may sometimes be updated, or expanded upon- and they may have dependencies on other assets, though probably not often.

Our team composition includes around 20 individuals with a diverse set of skills from the deeply technical to the aesthetic and visual (i.e. Software devs, artists, and technical artists). As an example of where we're at with our tooling- we've been able to onboard everyone onto git for version control, including our artists. However, this was only possible with the use of Github Desktop and Sourcetree git clients. We're using a self-hosted Gitea instance to store all of our repositories. We use Notion for process documentation, discord for team communication, and build primarily for Unity. We have a private npm package registry for Unity specific packages, and all other assets we share either through attachments in Notion or just by sending it directly when asked.

It's that last part that is woefully insufficient and I'm hoping to get advice on. How do other gamedev teams of similar size to ours handle syncing assets and tools across their teams. What we're doing now is not scalable and the discoverability of these tools and assets is so bad that often people are redoing work when they don't have to.

What workflows and processes are used to support this need? Are there solutions out there that are easy to onboard for people of less technical skillsets?

Answer 1

I worked at a studio of about 400 people and there was a central team managing the Unity plugins. I had to send them an email to get access to a unity asset for example. I dont remember much but I think they were also managing other types of assets. There was also a central tooling team who was providing tools to extend Unity capabilities. If I rembember correctly, we had to clone a SVN repository to get those tools. So maybe you could also provide your assets in one or more Git repositories. Specific roles could clone repos interesting to them and by doing so would get access to all your up to date internal tooling.

In another company of about 20 people, artist assets were simply put and organized into google drive. At least with Notion like you currently do, you can put context and visually organize your assets.

I've never seen this, but another option I guess would be to make your own artifact registry. For example using Azure you could easily create a NuGet or a npm registry: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/artifacts/start-using-azure-artifacts You can even create a "universal package" registry. But I think this might be overkill.