How does the style guide work [and how does it get updated]?
TL;DRThe style guide is a company-wide Confluence page organized by race, covering environments, weapons, vehicles, color palettes and silhouettes, useful for outside vendors and developed in a back-and-forth with the fiction writer.
Well, basically we have a Confluence page, which is a company-wide page that everybody has access to, and in these pages we decided to go big and then small, so we're starting with the bigger races. And then under the races, we have their environments, the weapons they use, the vehicles, backstory on them, the different things. So if you go to the Banu section, there'll be character, environments, weapons, different things specifically about them that make them who they are, like color palettes. If you look here, we have silhouette examples of the different styles of silhouettes for each of the races, what makes the races unique to themselves. This is really super handy for working with outside vendors and us, so that we can just hand it off to them, they can read it, they can get backstory on it, they can get instant visualization of what they're supposed to be working on.
We don't want to clutter it up too much with back fiction, because that's what other pages are for, but we work very closely with Dave Haddock, our fiction writer, as we're developing the reference and the artwork and as he's writing the backstory. So a lot of times what he writes will alter where we're going to go visually, and a lot of times stuff we come up with will inspire him in the writing, so it's kind of a back and forth process.
And this is kind of important because we have a lot of outsourcers or people around the world working on stuff. So if they're going to build, say, a Banu ship or something, they need to know what others have done and what look and feel you've set for them as Chief Visual Officer.