How do you manage / collaborate on a project in Unreal with Developers and Designers?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

We have a team of 3 designers and 2 developers with no prior industry experience working on a Unreal Engine 4 project. The designers will be creating assets & laying the scene out in the editor while developers work on the functionalities in C++ side. What’s a general strategy of partitioning work for such setup? More specifically, how do you have the team collaborating so that the project can be worked in parallel with minimal conflicts?

I understand that you can partition the map into sublevels and make sure that only one sublevel is being worked at a time. Well, what if you needed the designer to modify the scene while the developer adds some functionality to a sublevel? Is this not possible in Unreal?

Then there’s the matter of source control. Ideally, I’d like to setup a git repository but the designers probably doesn’t know how git works at all. Do game companies generally educate the designers so that they at least have working knowledge of source control to do what they need?

I’m just very confused about what the proper workflow should be.

2

As for working on levels in parallel, make the sub-levels small enough that “conflicts” will be rare. Remember that a lot of code changes won’t require changeing the map. Each coder can also have a private test map.

For version control, use SVN or Perforce instead. They are simpler than Git and something a digital artist should be able to handle.

3

As @HavocX said:

Use Perforce.

You need the asset locking capabilities and binary delta compression that git lacks.

Parallel concurrent work with binary assets is difficult, but unavoidable in game development.