A digital asset is any form of media that is created, modified, and accessible through a computer. Most commonly, it can be text, a still or moving image, or an audio clip. At higher levels, it can be a data point, a data set, or even a proprietary data type. It can be a digital record of a physical artifact.

Most important is that digital assets can be manipulated for storage and retrieval. Anything stored has the potential to be retrieved, but to be retrieved effectively, stored items need to be classified and catalogued in a way so that it may be discovered and found.

Game engines require developers to organize game assets into assigned locations for the game to run. In addition, game assets are often converted and compressed into data types to keep the data size manageable. The game package itself is its own library.

In the real world, developers working with raw assets run into a number of bottlenecks and blockers, such as lack of documentation, references, or works-in-progress because they most likely were saved somewhere on someone’s computer or simply sitting in a pile of named (maybe…) and dated, however, uncategorized assets.

As a producer and designer doing demonstrations and presentations, I was organizing my screenshots and gameplay videos according to feature and would reference the date of those assets to identify which milestone it represented. When a lead, QA, or someone from marketing wanted to look at something, I would get pulled away. While this was a nice distraction and a great way to get to know my colleagues, I didn’t always have the answer, and would redirect them to someone who might. I don’t know how those people felt about having to talk to a bunch of different people to find what they were looking for though.

Developers don’t always have the time to catalogue or even tag things. Even when they do, how consistent would those tags be? Are the terms they’re using to file away an asset be the same term used to search for it?