Say hello, Chipmunk!
The story of our journey so far
Editor’s Note: This blog was adapted from co-founder and CEO Lily Montoute’s Twitter thread from January 8, 2018.
After quite a bit of time and development, we finally have an open Chipmunk beta for the world. Exciting! So what is Chipmunk, exactly? Why did we make this?
Our journey as a company started in consulting for game development, simulation, and VR. We bounced around between a few projects, jumping between code and creating assets, including a few products on Unity’s Asset Store.
Centralizing all our creative assets, from logos and marketing materials to UI mockups and 3D models, has always been an extremely difficult problem to solve. As a small, bootstrapped business, we needed something simpler (and far less expensive) than large enterprise asset management systems. However, simple cloud storage wasn’t the right fit, either. It offered the ability to store, but that was about it. We wanted more than the ability to deposit and withdraw files. And so, after trying many different tools, we set out to create our own. Very quickly, we found that we weren’t alone in facing this problem.
Code is easy to work with — there are plenty of great version control systems out there and we love a lot of them. But so many of them fundamentally fail to deal with creative assets well. Some version control systems can handle large files, but semantically understanding features like layers, channels, and colors? Not really. They were designed, first and foremost, for storing and retrieving arbitrary files and folders.
Preparing and delivering assets to team members and end users are also big problems. In any industry, there’s a gap between the files creatives work with and what you use in production. This gets worse for smaller companies, who aren’t able to spend the effort developing custom asset pipelines from scratch. As a result, team members have to constantly create exports and transfer assets to each other. Duplicates hang around everywhere and productivity is wasted.
So what does Chipmunk do? Simply put, we’re bringing a fast, robust asset management pipeline to everyone, big and small. Our mantra is that all content should have a single source of truth. We convert, transform, and deliver original source assets in the format and specs you need, on-demand, on any device.
Finally, we integrate this pipeline everywhere. All your content, including 3D models, is viewable on the web. We currently have a plugin for Unity, with more tools and integrations for popular, industry-standard content creation software on the way. We’re also working on a platform for developers to use our API.
We’re opening this pipeline up for end user access too, meaning you can ship your game or app with Chipmunk and dynamically update assets on the fly, without requiring updates or patches. We do this with performance in mind, streaming data in and ensuring frame rates are acceptable (even in VR).
We believe that Chipmunk will enable creatives and creative teams to work together more efficiently. That way, you can spend more time doing what you love — making awesome stuff.
Thanks for taking the time to read about our story and vision of an efficient workflow for creative teams. We’re just getting started.
- Lily
To try Chipmunk for free, head to getchipmunk.com.
