Game production pipeline

What's the game development/production pipeline?

How is a game created? Certainly the developers must follow something like a plan in order to create the game they want, which is the pipeline. The pipeline is used to produce a game (in this case) following a structured procedure executed step-by-step.

Good but how does it all start?

(geralt, 2018)

It all starts with the pre-production phase, getting something to start with, such as ideas. The ideas can then be added and mixed up with stuff included like story, concepts, characters, genre, platform, gameplay mechanics, and the design document which contains almost all game designs in one folder or document according to (Tsekhansky, 2016, para. 2) and (Marco, n.d., para. 6).

I think these combined complete mostly of the necessities to create a flow in the later pipeline productions. Since the pre-production stage heavily affects the production and post production pipeline, pre-production is the most important step because that’s where issues is best resolved before causing trouble later on in the pipeline.

When the pre-production is finished and the whole design for the game is ready, the production starts. This is where the larger part of the teams as designers, engineers, producers, artists, and more will cooperate together in building the desired game (Edwards, 2016, para. 1) and (Tsekhansky, 2016, para. 3). Edwards (2016) writes in his article while following the production that “the artists during the production phase will be working on building all of the animations and art which you’ll see in the game” (para. 4). Continued by Edwards:

“The art will take care of creating all of the texture maps that are added to the 3D objects to give them more life and character and will also take care of animating any characters or objects that move in the game” (Edwards, 2016, para. 4).

While in production, the programmers are the ones building the game through programming and scripting so that the art assets in the game work as they should (noesisinteractive, 2010). Edwards (2006) states that the programmers are also coding the game’s engine, library and artificial intelligence. The engine is an application that is there to initiate, usually delivered by the art teams, creations in different forms which you see in the game (para. 6). The library is where the first creations are put for possible later reuse, available for updates and changeable for future games (para. 5). Last but not least, the artificial intelligence is programmed into how interactions, physics, movement, and movements of all characters and objects in game (para. 7).

(Ku, n.d.)

Tsekhanksy (2016) states that “when the game is considered “feature complete” and all of the code has been written and art is completed, it’s moved to the post-production stage.” (para. 4), but Marco (n.d.) states also that post production phase is where the developer can continue to improve the game if new bugs would occur and to add new features for the sake of the game’s retention (para.18), so this makes it believable that different point of views are explained to what actually goes on in post-production phase.  

As a conclusion, the game production pipeline is based on three stages: pre-production, production, and post production. Each one indicates the process or phases in game creation going from concept to completion.

Reference list:

Edwards, R. (2006, March 16). The Game Production Pipeline: Concept to Completion. Retrieved November 21, 2018, from https://www.ign.com/articles/2006/03/16/the-game-production-pipeline-concept-to-completion?page=2

geralt. (2018). [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://pixabay.com/en/bulletin-board-stickies-post-it-3127287/

Ku, K. (n.d.). Black Farmed Eyeglasses in Front of Laptop Computer [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.pexels.com/photo/coding-computer-data-depth-of-field-577585/

Marco. (n.d.). Game development pipeline: From concept to store – GameDev [Blog Post]. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from http://gamedevelopertips.com/game-development-pipeline/

noesisinteractive. (2010, December 15). design3 - Game Development Overview. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYkMT1q8KU

Tsekhansky, A. (2016, November 14). Infographic: The Game Production Pipeline - The Knights of Unity Blog [Blog post]. Retrieved November 20, 2018, from https://blog.theknightsofunity.com/game-production-pipeline/