As Asset Manager on Fable 2, my responsibilities were to setup and maintain all assets for design to use. This included all environmental assets, characters and their appearances, inventory items and other objects for the game. Although there was a large amount of work to do, it was all relatively simple. Needing something to push myself with, I began to develop tools for the development team to use.

I created a range of scripts for handling Asset Brief generation for outsourcing, which greatly reduced errors in hand-written briefs and allowed us to use a central spreadsheet for tracking all outsourcing briefs.

I wanted to develop a way to track the progress of art assets as they were setup by myself and eventually were placed in the game. I created a script that would collate all art and asset-specific data from the game's database and rearrange it into an easier format to search through. This more cohesive database was then packaged up and made available to the team. It was the start of the Asset List - the editor's search tool. This first version took a while to compile and was quite unruly, but by Fable 2's bugfixing phase it had matured into a fast, comprehensive and feature packed tool (written mainly in C# with some PHP / javascript / HTML) that took moments to collate the games database ready for searching / tagging.

My final tool was developed closely with the character artists. They were finding it hard to concept new clothing parts for the hero as they would have to work with all existing clothing items (and as these were not fitted to a template it was rather difficult to identify where meshes would overlap). I developed a tool that allowed them to sketch 2D projected concepts straight onto the hero model, and have this basic mesh tested in code against existing character meshes. The tool also allowed the exact layer setup of all clothing items to be viewed - something that the editor did not allow you to do.