Once almost everything is in order with a game, everything needs to be tested. Every game we’ve ever worked on was thoroughly playtested daily all through the production phase, and ideally every programmer will playtest the changes they’ve made to the code before submitting it. Even the most well-oiled development cycles still need a solid amount of time to squash any last minute bugs. It’s interesting to note that being a video game tester is not the most fun job in the game development industry.

Now that all of the creative ideas have been thoroughly planned out, the production phase is just working the plan. Ideally, this phase is relatively easy since the project manager picks the best people to implement each part of the game, based on what their strengths are. The programming side includes which developers should be assigned to creating the base infrastructure, UI implementation, and FX. The art side includes which artists will do the modeling, rigging/skinning, animation, characters, and environment assets.

Pre-production is composed of several fields including broad story, player interactions, game design, and the game design document. This is also where the designers explore visual aesthetics, the overall “look” of the game and more through preliminary concept art. The pre-production stage is by far the most important stage of development because the more answers you hammer out in the game design document (GDD), the quicker and smoother implementation of these ideas in the production phase.

Considering our game is based on a very clever novel, it’s necessary to try to carry the same feel in the game story that readers get from the book, all while avoiding book spoilers. The gameplay mockups are definitely among the first, if not the first image you’d want to put together. This is because the gameplay mockup images convey most of the information right away. For instance, if a developer is envisioning a side scroller platformer game, he or she wouldn’t want other people to picture a first person shooter.

Sometimes, as a game developer, you have that one special idea you’ve been incubating for years, just waiting for the right time to hatch it and other times you get a flash of inspiration and immediately just have a hunch it’d make a great game. As we saw the successful release of The Ables, we realized that this could be a really cool game. Looking back, we didn’t have any concrete ideas for anything going into it, but we knew that we wanted it to be awesome. The book perfectly laid the foundation for the game design, but we knew that we wanted to expand on the Ables universe quite a bit. This is where the first step of game development comes in: brainstorming...