Whether it be concept art, 2D art, 3D art, or animation, external art development is almost always an essential piece of modern game development. The external development manager must clearly communicate asset requirements to the external team, efficiently handle reviews and feedback, and, most importantly, deliver the highest priority assets to the internal development team exactly when they’re needed. Favro’s flexible collections, boards, and backlogs can make this happen in a way that enhances team productivity and strengthens alignment between the development studio and the outsource art company.

Empowered External Development Managers

External development managers need to control the flow of art assets, always ensuring that the highest priority assets are produced, reviewed, and delivered first. Favro empowers the manager with fully customizable boards and defined workflows. From start to finish, they create the exact workflow necessary to optimize art asset production, attaching reference images and requirements to asset cards, gathering review feedback, and facilitating final approvals.

Favro’s defined workflows combined with default values automate the process. Can cards be created or committed to any particular column? Who is allowed to move an asset card from and to each stage? Who should be automatically assigned to an asset when it moves into a review stage? The external development manager has full control over all of these variables.

Overview for Teams and Managers

Ideally, each and every external artist will have their own lane on the asset production board, which is fed from a prioritized art asset backlog. Thanks to these powerful capabilities both the managers and the external teams have complete visibility to who is working on what asset and exactly where it lives in the pipeline.

Cumulative flow charts are built directly into the asset production boards, showing progress, trends, and predictability.

With Favro’s advanced reporting app, managers filter down to the required level of detail.

Alignment Between the External Art Company and the Game Studio

Trust between the development studio and outsource art company is critical. Trust is built with transparency and alignment. Favro helps to build this healthy relationship thanks to its ability to invite external guests to any collection. By default, external guests can add, edit, and move asset cards. These permissions can be modified on each board and backlog in a collection. Both the external development manager and the art asset production teams stay aligned since they’re using the same backlogs, boards, and workflows.

Better Together

The partnership between internal development teams and external art teams is essential to today’s modern game development. Favro was created with this as one of its core design tenets. It’s built-in. Teams using Favro, no matter their geographic location, will benefit from a tighter, more aligned collaboration.

Get started now by signing up to Favro and trying one of our many game development templates.