"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success."

Henry Ford - American industrialist

Starting a Game Project

Importance of Planning

Regardless of your skill level, you can make a game too. Game development is just like any other skill - you only get better by doing, failing, and then improving. Every game project, regardless of the scale or genre, needs careful planning and good project management. This is mainly because ideas change over time, and it can be hard to keep up with ideas without a proper plan. A great way to start is by getting all those ideas out of your head and on to a piece of paper.

Plan Before you Start

Plan Before you Start

Regardless of what kind of game you might create, it’s always best to plan things out before starting such a project and before reaching for help online, or even before hiring artists and developers. Even if you plan to make a game by yourself, things might get out of control if you don’t have a solid plan or documentation to follow. Your plans and written documents will serve as a foundation for your idea as well as a guide to follow throughout the development. What you should do to prevent this, is a game design document (GDD). Every successful game project has done this.

If you're thinking about starting a game company of your own, the following video will offer some insight into the process. In it, the CEO of Futureplay Games discusses how they built up a successful game company.

Building a Game Company

Exercise: All You Need

Exercise: All You Need

Pre-production

One of the most important parts of game development is pre-production. It can save a lot of your precious time in the long run. Timetables, for example, are vital parts of the game development cycle. How is the team going to know when the game is supposed to be released if there are no timetables of any kind?

Pre-production is vital to all members of the team. It ensures that everybody knows exactly what's going on. If everyone knows why the team is doing things in a certain way, everyone can see the entire process the team is going through.

Prototyping

Prototyping is an important part of the pre-production phase. Creating prototypes allows the team to experiment with different ideas and scenarios for a game without risking large amounts of development time. Prototypes are usually meant to only act as proof of concept. Often, they need to be developed quickly with very little time for up-front design, although it depends a lot on the team's skills and planned timetable. You shouldn't get too fixated on polishing the prototypes as they're not supposed to match the final product in quality. At some point, you simply need to move on with the development.

How to Plan Better

Exercise: Bad Videogames

Exercise: Bad Videogames

Most bad video games are result of what?


Choosing your Tools

We are almost done with pre-production. The last thing to do is to choose the tools for the production of your game. There are tons of different tools out there and it's up to you to make the decisions. There are different programs for art and game engines, and in the next lesson we teach you the secrets of the Unity engine.