Portfolio | Stefan Andersson

Working on Toca Life, we have a lot of characters to implement. I believe the latest figure is around… 450 and growing? It’s also not uncommon for someone to get a detail wrong, like the hair color, especially when that information is passed from artist to developer who then has to manually input it, which would also take a lot of time.

With this in mind, I created a tool to give the control back to the artists by letting them input the character info into an online spreadsheet which can then be downloaded and processed.

To use it, first, if creating a new character, a developer uses the old tool used for this (also made by me) to create the actual prefab and put it in the correct folder. This will be made part of this newer tool at some later point.

Secondly, the developer downloads the spreadsheet as a .CSV file and selects it after starting the Import Tool. I tried to automate the download but for some reason the resulting .CSV would contain everything except the spread sheet data…

After that, the tool will go through each row, find the character prefab matching the entry and apply all the data. When all is done, I reapply all the graphical assets to the characters, using a different system, to make sure everything is up to date.

And that’s it! A fully functional character using (almost) zero developer work.

90% of the development work on Toca Life is building new locations, which means you spend a lot of time just putting out the same kind of objects, components and hierarchies again and again and again. I finally took the time a while back, however, to actually make a tool to speed this up.

I first tried making it a window that you slot into your layout, with buttons to spawn different objects. But, this had the problem that you would spend time moving your cursor out of the scene to push buttons, which will add up quite quickly.
So, I completely rewrote it a year later and made it part of the right-click menu instead and fleshed it out with more useful objects than before. I also made it so if you can right-click another object, the new object will be childed to that one, which is essential for the way we build scenes.

I would say this has sped up my scene-building work with maybe, 50%?