I still have not gotten to the mass clean-up that is required of the garage, but I have taken a few things to Goodwill that makes the garage less cluttered - a good start, anyway. This all has to happen real soon, too, because two of the four projects are for other people, and one of them has been paid for with a painting in advance, DOH!!!
As for today, I finally got off my ass and went sketching at the local book store.
As for politics today. I am quite annoyed about the conservative direction that this Nation has been heading, but I can't say that it's a surprise to me.
Here's why:
I am working in an industry that's constantly changing and the recent direction to go "Outsource" for a good percentage of my recent project, was, well, foreshadowed when I first started working in this industry. Back then, I didn't really think much about it because I was new to game development, and we were under a tight schedule that required outside resources to complete the project. At that time, ten years or so ago, we were "outsourcing" to small companies in Idaho, and India. Even though the idea was sound from a cost and time savings standpoint, the results were quite disappointing and ended up with me completely redoing their work from scratch - not much savings there. The artist in those companies were not trained in the standards of the time, what little of it there were, and communications were piss poor. A few years after my arrival at EA, I saw another attempt at outsourcing with the Godfather game.
Even though I was not involved with the outsourcing efforts on the Godfather game, I did hear the complaints over the assets that were received from the outsourcing partners. When the assets were review, the modeling lead was way pissed off and the outsourcing manager was totally frustrated. Those assets could not be used and had to be cleaned up to be used at all. The clean-up effort took away precious time and resources from our internal team that had little to no bandwidth in dealing with the problem, and thus, lots of over time work were put in by the already stressed out artist, only to have those assets used in limited fashion. Needless to say, outsourcing efforts for the Godfather did not go as planned, but still, outsourcing has been part of the development cycle since then, and will continue. But outsourcing was never a huge part in the development cycle until recently. Take for instance, my recent project, Dead Space. As most of you know, I was sent to China for three months, that became eight, to help with the "outsourcing" effort, because last year it was deemed mandatory to have most of this and future games "outsourced" to stem the tide of ever increasing development costs. I can see the logic from a financial point of view. When you can get six to seven junior artist for the cost of just one junior artist here in the States, it's a no brainer, and this is where I come in. The companies can eat the costs for one senior level artist to go over to China and train the six to seven junior artist the tricks of the trade, and by the end of the development cycle, that junior artist has just acquired the same experience as a junior artist in the States. Now with a promotion and a raise, you still get four or five to one in cost of labor. Now expand this scenario to the whole Nation, and you can understand why middle America is damn scared and pissed off, and hence more defensive and Conservative.
But the thing is, people don't see the new jobs and opportunities that are springing up around them. As jobs goes overseas, other jobs are coming here, but that's another discussion. It's now way late and I am way tired. So much for cleaning the garage tonight:p
be seeing you
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