AUG, 2023

Gamedev, Organizational

<aside> 📒 How to get to the proof-of-concept build

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The development cycle consists of three stages: preproduction, content creation, and polishing.

The goal of production is to spell out the creative intent and to form the roadmap.

Content creation is what everyone thinks the development is: adding new features.

Polishing is often overlooked but a crucial final step: it transforms the raw mess of features into an attractive product (or a prototype of thereof).

Preproduction

1. Creative Intent doc

The main question to answer: “What are we doing?”

The team (whole or the creative leads) synchronizes and codifies what game they intend to make. This is a short pitch without detalization, meant to be the compass during the initial development – until the first public playtest build when the premise can be actually tested and re-evaluated.

“A game about magnets”, “Satiric post-apocalyptic dungeon crawl”, “Mars colony city-builder”

Here’s an article about coalescing the creative intent. It’s about running tabletop RPGs – but it might be handy for story-focused games.