GameDev Digital Asset Management! (V1 now available!)

**UPDATE**

V1 of my GameDev Digital Asset Management app for Windows and Mac is now available on Itch.io (soon on C2 store) for 50% off for the first week! Check out the page for better info and newer screenshots: https://pudgyplatypus.itch.io/gamedevdam

PS: I will message anyone who showed interest here awhile back with some free keys <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink">

Hello fellow C2ers!

Quick background, I have been working with C2 for a couple years now but for my actual job I do database consulting in a platform called Filemaker.

But let's get to the point, I had realized how annoying it was scrolling through all the great game assets I acquired over the years in my dropbox and would eventually lose files. So out of sheer frustration with my organization skills, I created an Asset Management database app for my game development files.

If you don't know, Asset Management is a buzzword/term for a program that helps you organize your files (images, videos, audio, etc) and allows for easy searching through those files based on "keywords" or "tags".

So I built something that was as easy to use as I could make it but enough features to where it was really easy to find my assets I download and/or purchase to use in my games.

Some quick screenshots(on windows, it works and looks nicer on Mac <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_sad.gif" alt=":(" title="Sad"> ) - Sorry screenshots are a bit large for the forums:

List of images

Quick view of an image

Detailed view of image

Easy searching for "track" images I have tagged

Can play audio files right through the program

And can store video files

Can import entire folders of files instead of one at a time

And a fun little web view of the images that can actively show animated gifs

And some other features.

It's getting close to being done and thought I would just put this up here now so I can see if anyone is interested in something like this or some suggestions. I will be selling it but pretty cheap (I think just like 10 bucks but DRM free so install it wherever you want) and will work on Windows and Mac. For anyone REALLY interested I might be up to passing a couple out for free for some feedback/testing, so just comment on here if so.

With Opengameart.org, Scirra store, gamedev market, and others it is easy to accumulate a lot of great game art but it is also real easy to forget about the files or lose them. This will help you keep everything organized and easy to find and make copies to use in your games!

Thanks everyone!

Nick

Very interesting. I have more than 6gb of acumulated resources and it is very tough to manage. Your tool probably would be very helpful.

When you finish this tool, consider make available a demo/trial version for us to test.

Renfd That's a good idea, I probably will try and set up a demo version for sure.

Yea I can't believe how much time I have spent *looking* for assets as opposed to actually using them and making games. If anything, it is nice to have a quick visual look at some of the assets you have because for me I will be like "OH i have this animated character that would work great in X game" when I see the asset but if it is buried away I totally forget about it.

I've been looking for something like this for a while now.

Is there any way to embed a gif or a .swf into the thumbnail portion so i can view animated sprites?

Edit: I'd love to test it and provide more detailed feedback if at all possible

justifun Awesome well I hope it will help. I have the animated gifs to play in the program quite well, I haven't tested swfs but I would imagine they work similar to gifs in a "web viewer". I will try it out and let ya know.

Sure I will keep you guys on a list and when I have a more solid version I will send ya a link.

Thanks!

*UPDATED original post with where you can find the application and get some new info. Check it out!

Looks good. No demo for testing?

Good start, but its still pretty rough around the edges.

The whole interface feels very unpolished and not very intuitive or consistent between sections.

the webview lacks any of the abilities to select/download the images

it would be nice to be able to adjust the size of the thumbnails in the main "image assets" tab

the "import folder or files " button opens a dialogue box that only shows the windows profile set of directories instead of the rest of the computer etc. A regular full file browser window would be ideal .

when clicking import files, it would be nice if they file type defaulted to whichever tab you are currently browsing (image/audio/video)

The "previous keywords" dialog box isnt shared between image/video/audio

On the audio tab, if would be better to be able to preview sounds without having to open the music player then and have to hit back to return to the list. it would be ideal if you could just hit a play button right in the list of music files.

the entire interface cant be re scaled nicely to a smaller form factor. it takes up a lot of room on my desktop.

when importing lots of files the dialog box just says "please wait" with no indication if its working or not. appears to be stuck for a while, but eventually works.

it would be ideal if the data base of imported assets are stored on the network and multiple users could share the

same repository

keep going! looking forward to future updates,

justifun Thanks for the feedback! All of that is very helpful.

Yea I had gone back and forth a lot on Interface, I mainly had worked on this on a Mac so the Fonts and interface ran and looked much smoother than the Windows version so I had to go back and tweak it after the fact to try and make them not so different which in turn kind of put some views in an odd limbo. Are there any specifics on the basic interface, the fact that it tries to keep you in one window at all times so there is the whole going back instead of it popping up? Or the Detail view of the asset looking quite different and plain compared to the lists? I'm just trying to see if maybe your views on the interface are similar which would help since I was planning on a lot of that.

Most of the other ones you point out are actually pretty small changes and also ones that I agree with for sure, so that's good!

As for the Please Wait dialog, I hadn't realized that (since on the Mac side it works correctly, by showing X out of Y assets imported in the dialog box) until after submitting it which sucks.

There are some limitations in the software I used to make it in the first place, so a about 6 months ago I was like maybe I should just do this in Construct 2! But I think C2's hugest weak point is "Simple" set up for long lists of things along with better text entry and search support. There are some plugins out there that might help but it seemed like most of them were just missing a couple things that would critical for me to switch over to a more web based version. Anyways, I'm rambling here!

Thanks again for the feedback and I'm sure I can actually get a lot of those fixed up soon!

Nick