Game Design Process - Stages of Development

In today's session we learned about the Development Process and the Stages of Development.

The three Stages of Development are Pre-Production, Production and Post Production.

In groups, we were given a list of development processes and were asked to judge which stage of Development we thought they occurred in.

In my group we categorised as such:

Pre Production: Analysis of Brief, Research, Concepts, Sketched Level Design, Prototype, Scape and Proportion, Rules and Limitations, Brainstorming, High Concept.

Production: Map Development, Intro/Cut/End Scenes, Texturing, Lighting, Game Rigging, Animation, AI, Menu/HUD, Level Blockout, Testing, Outsourcing, Localization.

Post Production: Maintainence, Marketing.

While we were mostly correct, the actual categorisation is:

Pre-production: Analysis of Brief, Research, Brainstorming, Concepts, Map Development, Sketched Level design, Prototype, High Concept document

Production: Scale and proportion, Blocking out of the level, Texturing, Lighting, Rules and Limitations, Game Rigging, Animation, Artificial Intelligence, Intro/Cut/End Scenes, Menus/HUD

Post-production: Testing, Maintenance, Outsourcing, Marketing, Localization

While we got some parts slightly wrong to the accepted example, this is not a hard categorisation. There are examples of Outsourcing occurring during production, for things such as graphics, and Marketing could start before Production, with crowd-sourcing drives on Kickstarter or Indie Go-Go.

The Pre-Production phase is mostly about getting the initial ideas and concepts into a coherent design, usually the High Concept and Game Proposal. The publisher may require some extra detail on top of simply the idea, which would come in the form of the Game Plan Document. This document lists all of the things a publisher might want to know such as The high concept, game's genre, gameplay description, features, settings, story, target audience, hardware platforms, estimated schedule, marketing analysis, team requirements and risk analysis. The publisher requires this information as it needs to judge if the game is worth seeing through to production. If it is deemed too risky, then this may be where the journey ends.