Could you go more in depth with the pre-production phase? What usually occurs during this period, and is it just an amalgamation of separate prototypes, or more organized than that? Is this where technical and design documents are created, too?
It’s better to take a step back and look at where a game idea is before we enter preproduction and then where it is once we finish preproduction.
Before we enter preproduction, the project is in the Concept phase where we try to figure out what the game is going to be. This might be a specific theme and story that the studio founders really want, or a pitch from a dev that gets approved by the leadership. Going from Concept to Preproduction means that we know what kind of game it’s going to be, what themes the game will have, how the game should earn its keep, and have decided what the core gameplay systems should be for the game.
The main purpose of preproduction is to lock down what the game will look like and what the game will play like. Preproduction for devs like me is where we build working prototypes of the ideas and documents that we wrote for our green-lit pitch in order to prove that they will, in fact, work for the game. We begin with individual prototypes to see if the systems will work in a vacuum, and then work towards integrating these prototype systems into the game engine. Our engineers and designers work together to set up working systems that can be played and show how they feel to a player. This is the “what the game will play like” part.
During preproduction, we also usually build a “beautiful corner” to prove out the game’s targeted visual style and look. This isn’t a full level, but a small environment with production-quality visuals. This is a high fidelity area with all of the final-quality lighting, shadows, texturing, shaders, and so on. This will include the player character, maybe one or two NPCs, and the environment. It doesn’t have to be fully interactable, but it does have to look like what we intend to make the final game’s visual style.
Preproduction ends when we have actually built all of the core systems and gameplay we planned to, and then integrated them together into the game engine. This culminates in a [vertical slice], which is essentially a single production-quality level with all of the gameplay systems working together (spawning, combat, traversal, leveling, stealth, crafting, questing, inventory management, and so on) for a cohesive experience. The vertical slice should feel like we took a level out of a complete game and offered it as a demo – it should be a great representative of the entire game that we plan to build. It should be engaging, interesting, and fun to play. It should feel intuitive and responsive. It should feel like a real game. This is our “first playable” – if we get the green light from the executives, we can transition from preproduction to production and build the rest of the game and content with our first playable as our blueprint.
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