M+E Daily

Game and other content makers have new tools at their disposal to develop their titles.

During the webinar “Version Control for Creators: Integrating Helix DAM and Helix Core” on Oct. 25, Johan Karlsson, senior product manager at software company Perforce, and Chris Perez, the company’s director of product marketing – Media & Gaming, demonstrated the latest capabilities of its Helix digital asset management (DAM) solution.

They explained how DAM software can improve an organization’s creative processes and workflows.

During the demo, they covered how to seamlessly connect Helix DAM to existing Helix Core projects and streams through a new release update. Helix Core is the company’s enterprise-class version control that it says provides faster, more collaborative development for teams of any size.

Karlsson and Perez also walked viewers through how development teams can take advantage of the scalability and security of version control across their creative and development projects, as well as how to customize a team’s Helix Core view settings and streams pathing.

“As two people who have successfully deployed DAM projects both from a customer success side as well as a project manager side, we have a lot of great tips to share and of course some exciting features to show along the way,” Perez said at the start of the webinar.

He moved on to provide market insights, telling viewers: “What we’ve been hearing from our recent customer advisory boards and really just like interactions across industries is that scaling complexity of products and environments are growing by at least a factor of 10x.”

Meanwhile, he said: “Artists are now outnumbering developers by five to one on average. External collaboration across [geographies] and partners [is] standard practice. And because the tech staff underserves artists, teams often find themselves creating more work. They’re remaking assets. They’re redoing changes and edits, simply because there isn’t knowledge of the assets across teams or they can’t find it.”

That, he said, is “important to note because your creative capital [represents] massive growth in the assets you’re creating but also your teams; they’re your differentiator.”

An important thing to keep in mind, he said: “If you’re thinking about incorporating new tools like” generative artificial intelligence (AI) “in your workflows, this problem is only going to compound.”

That, he said, is why “we believe centralized systems are really needed for large teams and large projects.”

He explained: “With all these assets distributed and remote in the nature of the way we work, centralized version control is what [brings a] structure and management layer to your workflow. And that’s really what Helix Core and Helix DAM allow. They provide a backbone for collaboration and asset reuse…. And the single source of truth can be maintained across your teams.”

Meanwhile, developers can “scale endlessly without sacrificing performance,” he said, adding they can secure their environments at a team member level and really just accelerate development through this single source of truth.”

Karlsson later pointed out that “one of the big points around why you need a centralized version control system is, of course, that If you have multiple people that [have] been working on this, that will be listed here. And you can very quickly navigate and see how the different versions look like.”

There is also an information section “where you have basic information about the file or about the asset” and a metadata section, Karlsson said.

During the following Q&A, Karlsson said “you need to have a Helix Core” and Helix DAM license.

Asked what file types Perforce supports, Karlsson said: “I think it depends really on what you mean by support because… Perforce has been versioning everything so you can really upload any file types that you want into Helix DAM…. There may be a number of file types that we don’t support.” There is also a list of file types that we have in our documentation that he said, “we do support for the previews and the thumbnails.”

Asked if Perforce is planning to add other integrations to Helix DAM, Karlsson said: “Absolutely. We’re constantly reviewing the integrations that we have and … right now, we are working on [a] new JIRA integration…. We’re all looking at supporting additional” tools and “we’re really looking for feedback there [on] what would be the next one where you would like us to integrate because we have many to pick from there and we’re going to add several as well.”

He added: “Feel free to put in the question box here what integrations you’re looking for.”

Perforce also invited game developers and other content creators to get free access to its Helix DAM sandbox for 14 days so they can “start saving and sorting assets, comparing every version of [their] art in one place, and collaborating on projects” with their teams.