Leading pipeline tools developer Shotgun Software today announced that its flagship production management tool, Shotgun, is now optimized for integration into game-specific workflows. Primed to tackle increasing challenges in the game industry, this launch is the result of over a year of collaboration with more than thirty top game studios including Avalanche, Microsoft Game Studios, and EA, and allows studios to seamlessly manage their art department's and remote partner's workflow, increasing studios' creativity, productivity and cost-efficiency. Shotgun is unveiling Shotgun for Game Developers at the XDS (External Development Summit), September 3-5 in Vancouver, Canada, and will be providing an overview of the tools at the Shotgun Presentation, Tuesday September 3, 2013 from 1:00-2:30PM.
“Shotgun has proven to be an important tool for many of our AAA titles at Electronic Arts. With its powerful plug-ins and fully customizable UI, Shotgun allows our internal and external development teams to collaborate, plan and organize our work like no other tool,” said William Lee, Development Director at EA.
“One of the nice things about Shotgun is that due to its unified web interface, artists are able to update their tasks and have the data automatically rolled up into the globally visible data and fancy charts that we created,” explained Arthur Shek, Technical Art Director, Turn 10 Studios.
This game industry initiative marks a natural evolution for Shotgun, already a go-to toolset used by hundreds of leading studios and facilities worldwide including Blue Sky Studios, Double Negative, Framestore, Method Studios, Illumination-MacGuff and more. This games industry-tailored version of Shotgun integrates proven features such as production tracking and collaborative review and approval into game art workflows, and its familiar holistic approach provides useful tools for everyone in the studio. Managers can easily track, schedule and manage a project from start to finish with an integrated set of apps and Shotgun’s custom reporting. Shotgun has specifically designed tools for artists that provide simple and visual task views and tools to access important project information and collaborate with other artists and supervisors. Supervisors have tools to continuously review artist work, annotate images, and provide feedback to creative teams; the feedback loop is seamless even when project work is being managed across multiple facilities with teams distributed around the globe.
Key features include :
- Plan, track and manage all game art
- Iterate, review and collaborate with artists both in and outside your studio
- Web-based playback and annotation tools directly within Shotgun interface
- Integrates with other tools to build the most robust pipeline for your studio
- Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit seamlessly integrates with apps like Maya and Photoshop to automate and speed up artist tools and tasks
- Flexible options with easily customizable toolset
- Integrates with Perforce
- Integrates with key engineering tools via Open API
Shotgun Co-founder and CEO Don Parker explained, “Game studios are dealing with the similar pain points as the entertainment business – shortened production schedules, tightened budgets, and the increased complexities of managing multiple teams and partners in various locations. Our mission is to help our clients and we’ve partnered with some of the most demanding players in game development to build out the Shotgun platform to solve real game production pipeline problems.”
For more information and to apply for a free trial, please visit http://www.shotgunsoftware.com/games .
About Shotgun Software
Shotgun Software was founded in 2006 by a group of visual effects professionals to build production tracking, review and asset management solutions for modern studio pipelines. The founding members worked together on a major studio animated feature and develop tools to fill the mounting industry need for a commercially viable system for managing complex projects spread across multiple locations. Shotgun is actively developing the system with more than 400 industry studios including EA, Microsoft, PlayStation and Blizzard. For more information and an online demonstration visit http://www.shotgunsoftware.com