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To save time and money, Companies are turning to crowdsourced design competitions like 99designs.com for Logo design & more. The idea behind these competitions is, instead of hiring one designer, you hold a “design contest” to receive 100s of design submissions, pick the best one, and then award that designer the money.
Indie and Amateur Game Devs like me could benefit from such services. I thoroughly searched the internet for a crowdsource platform specializing in 3D Game Assets: Characters, Vehicles, Weapons, etc. The results: DesignCrowd.com and many links to how InXile is crowdsourcing 3D Unity models for Wasteland 2.
Why isn’t there a crowdsourcing platform for 3D Game Assets? Obviously, authoring and animating a 3D Entity requires more time… Eureka! I had an idea and it works similar to a Distributed Computing System (ie UE3 SWARM) combined with Modular Entity Construction (UMECHS).
How it Works:
[ol]
[li]Game Devs submit 3D Game Entity Design[/li][li]Generate Concept Art [/li][li]Dissect the Entity into Parts (UMECHS Rig & Bash Mesh Selection) [/li][li]Present Parts Design to Crowd (Design Pack) [/li][li]Collect Parts Output from Crowd [/li][li][Automated Assembly] Entity Variations from Parts for Review by Game Devs[/li] [Manual Assembly]
[LIST=1]
[li]Customer Customization [/li][li]Assisted Customization [/li][/ol]
[li]Customer selects one or more Entity, Parts, or Packs for Purchase. [/li][li]Publish Unselected Assets in Asset Marketplace for Sell to the masses. [/li][/LIST]
There are several pros and cons to crowdsourcing as explained here. My Distributed Crowdsource Authoring for 3D Game Art & Animation model addresses the Cons of Crowdsourcing Assets for both Buyers and Sellers. I’m still flushing out the idea and open to both good and bad critique.
Thanks for reading.