The Business of Art
To operate a digital goods business in the Web 3 space, STG's Product team settled on a permutation matrix of Rarity and Quality that could generate a variable quantity of unique player assets sold in Lootboxes.
Developing A Data Driven Render Pipeline
Michael Saperstein coined the term "Borderline Genius," a highly reserved and humorous compliment. "Borderline" became truth a year into development, as the initial pipeline had to be optimized for sustaninability. More about that later.
I had the honor of coining these new assets "Minted Object Graphics," or MOGs, building on our prior legacy from Tap Sports Baseball.
I broke down the daunting task of creating this pipeline with a table defining the rarity/quality permutations. I already knew I wanted to use Dataclay's Templater plugin for After Effects.
Sap and I worked with the Product team and developed a tool that would export JSONs from the Game Engine that could be read by Dataclay. Dataclay's Bot feature also tracked and managed the render of thousands of assets.
Exhaustive documentation was kept on Confluence for the development and maintenance of the pipeline, which served both the Game Client and Web Marketplace projects.
The result of this collaboration resulted in the following matrix, which showcases a visual stepdown for each quality and rarity value.
Over the next 2 years, STG Football would release 17 Unique player sets, some of which are shown below.
The Art Factory
Once The Player Asset Pipeline was developed, I created the Lootbox render pipeline. While much simpler, both Players and Packs would require a team of dedicated artists to support each Set Release. Tim Tang and Michael Tran produced an arsenal of Player and Pack assets from these templates.
They executed on logo design, animation, and extensive shader and rendering E3D work within After Effects. Immediately after internal art approval, all assets were sent to the NFLPA for licensing compliance review. The STG Art team typically fixed issues such as name spelling, suffixes, and jersey colors due to team change.
Tens of thousands of Player Asset Files
Pack Assets for Game Client and Web Marketplace
Game Client UI Reveal
Unlike the Web Reveal, we did not want to serve a unique video each time the User opened a lootbox. The Pioneer Lootbox Reveal shown earlier and all other Web Reveals provide a much slower experience, delivering around 12-30 seconds of anticipation based on the User's actions.
The Product team hoped the Client Reveal would cycle in about 3-10 seconds. I mocked this up in After Effects, prepped all the sprites, built the prefabs in Unity, then animated the Reveals using Unity's Animation Controllers and Clips. The Reveals were packed together into a prefab for instantiation as needed across dialogs.
Eventually, the number of player assets became an issue for the build machine. Art and development worked together once again to optimize/refactor the pipeline. We were able to schedule this into a milestone and find a path forward, which allowed the build machine to run smoothly once again.
We definitely learned a lot from this experience and I hope to be able to continue building technologies like this to support Games as a Live Service.
