Farr Sara Pre-production Phase Video Game Design

A vital phase of game development, pre-production often remains overlooked or misunderstood. To shed some light on this vitally important process, we've talked to Room 8 Studio's producers about the cornerstones for laying out a ground plan for creating a great game.

What Is a Game Pre-Production Stage
Key Game Pre-Production Stages
1. Core concept
2. Prove that there's a market
3. Figure out game progressions
4. Create prototypes
5. Plan your pipeline & team responsibilities
6. Question everything you do
7. Set the project timeline and iterations
8. Create documentation
9. Plan for QA
Game Pre-Production Challenges
Our Experience
Final Thoughts

What Is a Game Pre-Production Stage

Pre-production is an initial planning phase of a game development project, which focuses on creating core concepts and writing initial design documents, that describe the future game.

Game creation starts way before its production stage and this pre-production stage influences the overall success and team spirit a lot. Pre-production generally consumes a portion of the amount of time you plan to spend actually developing a game. For example, 2-year project pre-production could take about 1-3 months for a mobile title, but this estimate may vary greatly depending on the genre. What's important, adding a pre-production phase cuts the overall production time since it streamlines all processes.

Key Game Pre-Production Stages

Core concept

Game design pre production starts with questions. What's your target audience? What are the key gameplay mechanics? What are the pillars of your game? The game demography tells game designers how they should be attempting to design their systems and gameplay spaces.

And the central gameplay mechanic is what you're banking everything on. This is where your players enjoy themselves, and where your game tends to live or die. Describe all major features.

Prove that there's a market

No serious publisher would sign a game without running a marketing test against it first. The publisher would want to see advertising metrics and early-stage engagement metrics, early monetization, etc. Check the install costs vs target geography as well.

The most popular method in video game pre production is to throw some ads up using a special app and get a sense of how your target audience responds to those ads. There are lots of other market analysis methods: be sure to choose the most appropriate one or use a combo.

Figure out game progressions

Video game pre production process requires game designer to outline game economy, events, game mechanics, how you will be introducing new mechanics. Think of metagame, key numbers, monetization, and gameplay.

Create prototypes

Prototyping is an important couple of weeks in the game development pre production where designers, programmers, artists, and level designers, all get to flex their muscles and create basic prototypes of gameplay features they want to see.

You need to test the experience your game provides with test sessions. Before prototypes happen, though, they need to justify what they are aimed to accomplish: any prototype is meant to answer a particular set of questions, to fulfill a clear goal. Do the characters appeal to your target audience? Is a given mechanic or a level fun? Does a level 5 look worse than the others? Which color scheme or UI works best for the majority of testers? These are the types of questions that may be precise enough to improve your game.

Plan your pipeline & team responsibilities

Identify key positions and people and plan their workload so that everyone will be productive when they come on board after the game pre-production phase. Outline the responsibilities of each and how they will interact. Game pre-production pipelines must be well defined and must be followed as closely as possible by everyone. It also takes quite a while to adjust to pipelines, especially if you haven't used them or have people who are bottlenecking them.

Question everything you do

As Firaxis Games' Greg Foertsch pointed out in his GDC speech, some of your tech and creative decisions might seem good at first glance because they were the best answer to the problem back in 1994. Deconstruct & reconstruct if necessary.

Set the project timeline and iterations

Timelines are important in the pre-production stage in game development. This creates a lot of structure around which your team is going to be creating their content. Can timelines be adjusted? YES! But you want to go in with a conservative estimate and make sure your whole team is on board with this.

Create documentation

Before production begins, you should have at least the core of Game Design Document. GDD is a large, fat document which outlines every aspect of the game design on a high level — what is the game, why is it fun, what does the player do, where does the game take place, what are the core mechanics, what do the enemies do, what is the challenge, etc. On the pre-production of a video game, create high-level GDD, with examples. It should literally sell the game to the investors or the rest of the company, describing core game loop, meta, and mechanics, and give an idea of what the game will be and why it'll be fun.

Plan for QA

Create a thorough test plan, with test cases that QA specialists will work with from the 1st week of the production stage. As the importance of pre-production in game development lies partly in creating a work plan for all team members, make sure you plan ahead for the QA.

Game Pre-Production Challenges

Creating a new game from scratch isn't easy, nor is the pre-production stage of video game design. While pre-production is basically a movie term, the game creation consists of largely the same things as a movie: characters, plot, lighting, etc. Many of those things have nothing to do with technology. Every studio does it a little bit differently: needs vary based on the type of the game and the team.

Here are the most common pitfalls in any creative process including game development:

Not matching the target audience. How to avoid: conduct a thorough analysis, and test your prototypes with focus groups.
Bad metagame. Again: the story might sound amazing on paper, but you'll see it's bad when you start playing. How to avoid: try prototyping as early as you can, focusing on your meta, keeping in mind the most important question: is this what my target audience wants?
Architecture mistakes that can cause serious delays due to tech problems. How to avoid: Plain & simple, put effort to study and follow the world's best practices on emerging tech.

Our Experience

Room 8 Studio's team has over 10 years of experience creating games for partners as well as our own titles. You can find the most relevant information on the topic below:

Full cycle game development service page
Article: External Full Cycle Mobile Game Dev: How To Scale Right
Article: How To Make A Match-3 Game: A Complete Guide
Project: Trivia Royale
Project: Cat Force

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, the pre-production phase lays out a ground map and gives an ability to direct the team's actions on the production phase. Like for a ship's captain in the open seas, it's way better to discover new worlds with a good map and an idea of the desired destination.

Pre-production may be provided as a service or as a part of full cycle game development project. If you need consulting, Room 8 Studio's team is always happy to help.

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