When you sit down to play any video game on your console at home, it may not dawn on you the steps you have taken to create and produce the games that are on your machine. There are many elements in the world of video game services from the initial phase of game designing to game programming, to testing and finally the game showing up on the shelves of your local store.
Each of these subsets of the game development process is important in its own way.
Design for any game is done in the first place when users, programmers and developers discuss planning for the game and who will appeal to the market. Next comes the programming phase where the game is actually created and developed by a specific team working against a set of specifications. The final stage before you see it in the store is the testing phase where professional testers will try to crack the product before it goes live. Their job is key because they are the last line of defense before the game is out into the world for paying customers to buy. With any game development this always starts with the game design stage.
This process involves designing game content and rules based on a defined set of instructions from the business. Everything from the characters, storyline and environment, to names but some will be tackled and designed here. If you are a designer then you will need some artistic and technical skills to bring ideas to life. This design will start with just an idea and develop into something more concrete that can be developed. This is one of the most critical stages of the entire development process.
If you are wrong then the game might not work.
After the design stage of the development life cycle it comes down to programming. This is where the idea and design is taken and actually operates with a series of lines of code running behind the scenes as the game is played. This line of code will tell, for example, the character to perform a certain action or talk to other characters in the game. It is at this stage that the game begins to take shape towards the finished product that will be sold. The final phase before the game is marketed and packaged ready for sale is the video game testing element of the process.
This is perhaps the most important of all the phases as without this department there is no way to know if the game is ready to play or full of bugs. It is the tester’s job to make sure that there aren’t any glaring errors in the code that are preventing the game from working properly. These problems are then reported and fixed by the developer who is ready to be retested to check that all is well. In short, the game development process is fairly straightforward. The hard part is the actual elements of that process from design to testing and then marketing. All areas are key to the overall success of any video game and without them the game will fail.