Designing a game is really tricky. Gaming as it is claimed ” Its bigger than Hollywood in terms of money generated”. No doubt its a multi million business but ever thought How a game is designed. There are steps of game designs which I wrote back 10 Steps to great game design part 1 and 10 Steps to great game design part 2. But how it comes of life ? We hear of Beta and alpha game releases what are those? You got it…testing before the original comes out. Lets take a peek into the life cycle of games and understand how this multi million dollar revenue stream works.

1) Basics and Sketch:

It starts whwne an idea of the game is born. This is then documented down and sketches are prepared which might give a picture ot the idea of the game to be designed. This forms the skeleton of the game.

2) Analysis and Theme design factors:

This idea then goes to a designer who can thing of various aspects like devices that can be used, hardware configuration, in depth analysis, graphic themes, branding. One of the most important thing to be taken care is the target audience recognition. You will have to think a lot as design should not be too distractive.

3) Designing a prototype:

Depending on all the factors decided above, it goes for a prototype design which means a skeleton which can be looked and felt. This gives a chance to see whats coming next. re designing at this level can be often unless you fix up all the bugs. Thats what happens in beta stages.

4) Tweaking and recoding:

This is where all the struggle starts to get the game working as they imagined. The developer now sits on with extreme coding and re-coding with tweaks. Depending on the hardware targeted there are numerous bugs that keep coming.The major source of this being is what comes from internal testing.

5) Game goes Beta.

Now the fun begins. Every game to be launched goes into beta testing. This is kind of trend. Beta testing is done by the users itself. There are many bugs which come at “runtime”. These bugs come due to many hardware constrains or could be logical bugs in coding. Data from various testers are taken and bugs are fixed again.

6 ) Porting to make it compatible:

This is little pain taking. Porting is to make it compatible with major hardware configuration so it can target larger audiences. These are are tested again to check what we did in beta testing.

Go Live: The game is now launched to public. Depending on the game it might rock or flop. Before digging into this article I never knew there is so much of pain taking. We do in software but I never thought its the same thing. SO next time you play a game, do read the credit statement which makes people proud for developing that game.

Tags: design factors, game releases, prototype design