What's the basic process for making a game?

What's the basic process for making a game?

Harry Ravenswood (Lead Designer, Kuju Entertainment) gives expert video advice on: What is a developer and what do they do?; What are 'easter eggs'?; Why do developers put easter eggs in games? and more...

There's no single process to making a game, really. At the moment, I think game designers, or game development I should say, is going through a number of experiments and different philosophies are coming out to do with project management. There's agile game development, and there's standard, typical project management, classical cascade project management. But the ideal way I've found to make games, the one I've enjoyed in the past, is to actually come up with concept and get a small prototype team together - that would usually involve a coder, an artist, a designer and a couple more people, depending on the size and scale of the project. You get the concept of the game working well, the core game play right, and then once you've established that, you roll into full production, and that's where you hire everyone, and you know what you're doing, what you're going to make. You start pushing forward with full game development. You start building your levels properly and in earnest. You'll be building final art assets, you'll be consolidating the game code, you'll be testing the game, and you'll have a goal in mind, a final release date, that you'll be working towards.