Workflows
Our workflow optimises for efficiency, stress-free working, organisation, and transparency. The whole team should know what is going on and where they fit into it. More on the research behind it: Managing a Studio Session 1 - Stress-Free Game Dev.
They state what is true, completely and exactly. Nobody has read all of it.
If you want to be told what to do next instead, that is How-To; if you are new, that is Start Here.
The pages
| Page26 | Area | What |
|---|---|---|
| 3D Models | 3 days | Blender to Unity, and the conventions that only exist in Blender. |
| Balconies | 3 days | A floor that projects, a railing that guards it, and what holds it up. |
| Characters | 3 days | Everything skinned to a rig, and the one part of it that is written down. |
| Curves | 3 days | Walls that are part of a circle: the turn, the radius, and why only one of them is in the name. |
| Grooming | 3 days | The route from Sisir to Unity: what is the source, what is a bake, and what the file format costs. |
| Hair | 3 days | The three tiers, the card budget, and why overdraw is the cost no other rule was measuring. |
| Hair Cards | 3 days | The data a hair card carries: what a card is, what the four channels mean, and which colour field is the contract. |
| Hair Motion | 3 days | Movement, length and growth: what a card must carry for each of them, and why only the mesh half of that is written down. |
| Modular 3D Assets | 3 days | Scale, grid, pivots, budgets and the kit pipeline. |
| Openings | 3 days | Doors, windows, shutters and trapdoors. What fills a hole, and how it is sized. |
| README | 3 days | How the diagrams on the character pages are regenerated, and which numbers in them are copies of the rules. |
| README | 3 days | The scripts that draw the diagrams on the Modular 3D Assets pages. |
| Roofs | 3 days | Pitch, the parts of a roof, and the wall that closes it. |
| Splitting a Piece | 3 days | How one element becomes several parts that still snap together. |
| Audio Workflow | audio | Naming, formats, loudness, mono and length. |
| Builds | code | Versioning, what gets built, and the generated changelog. |
| Diagram Style | docs | How every diagram in these docs is drawn: one shared kit, one palette, one way to label things. |
| Level Design | level-design | How we approach building a level. |
| Scene Structure | level-design | Multi-scene layers, hierarchy sections, object naming. |
| Naming Conventions | naming | The name grammar, every category, and which category a thing is. |
| Project Folder Structure | naming | Where everything lives. The name decides the folder. |
| The Words We Use | naming | Which word to use when several would do. 151 of them. |
| Materials | texture | Naming, variants, channel packing, and what SMM_ is for. |
| Modular 3D Assets - Texturing | texture | Trim sheets, vertex painting, RGB masking, overlays. |
| Texture Workflow | texture | Categories, texel density, folders, import settings. |
| Version Control | version-control | Gitea, Git LFS and file locking. One system for everything now. |
And the one everything else is generated from:
- Asset Rules (Generated): every rule, as the tools actually enforce it
- The Words We Use: which word to use for a thing, when several would do
The shape of it
Where things live
Four systems can hold a file. This is which one wins.
| Kind of file | Lives in | Backed up by | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Project source assets (.blend, source textures) |
Gitea (Git LFS) | Gitea server + Backup | Single source of truth |
| Exported game assets | Gitea, in the Unity project | Gitea server | Generated, never hand-edit |
| Purchased / downloaded library assets | Q-Dex | Q-Dex | Never committed to a game repo directly |
| Reference, mood boards, field recordings | Q-Dex | Q-Dex | |
| Raw video and large media | Bubbly Backup | - | Out of version control |
| Tools, packages, web projects | Git (Gitea or GitHub) | Gitea / GitHub | Includes bubbly-asset-rules |
| Builds | Internal launcher | - | See Builds |
| This vault | Git / GitHub | GitHub |
Anything under /Exported is generated and never edited by hand.
→ Version Control > What is in version control for the per-path detail
Changing workflows
Workflow changes are discussed with the entire team, tested, announced before they happen, and approved and finalised by the studio leads. This includes any rule changes.
The flip side is worth saying out loud: a rule that is wrong is worth raising. Several of the
conventions in these pages exist because somebody new said "this doesn't make sense" and was right.
Asset rules specifically are changed in the bubbly-asset-rules repo, then regenerated with
npm run docs && npm run vault. Editing a generated table in Obsidian does nothing at all.