PRE-PRODUCTION: WHY IT’S UNDERRATED

This is the point where you place the North Star that guides your game.

Pre-production is the first stage in a game’s development process. Characterized by endless questions and infinite possibilities, this is the point in the production lifecycle where you place the North Star that guides your game toward your vision. Pre-production may be daunting initially, but it becomes more manageable when you work through it one step at a time. This article outlines the critical steps of the pre-production phase in no particular order. Please feel free to jump around and iterate as needed—you may realize that a once brilliant idea may no longer fit the overarching theme of the game when you start filling in more detail.

Land on a Central Theme

Whether a team is small and independent or large and well-funded, establishing a central theme to build the game upon is a crucial step of pre-production. Taking into consideration that everyone has a distinct creative process, our team at Amebous Labs went about this step in multiple ways:

1. We met collectively to throw out ideas and complete prompts that tested our imaginations, forcing us to think outside the box.
   
2. We also had solo brainstorming sessions and shared our concepts with the team via two-minute pitch presentations. With so many great ideas to work with, we picked two of our favorites and split into teams to get started on the details. After a week of fleshing out these concepts, both groups presented their pitches. Together, we discussed what would work for VR and identified potential threats to the development process.
   
3. We sought out and incorporated outside perspectives to land on our idea for Loam.

While this process will not be ideal for every team, it proved to be an uncomplicated way for us to consider everyone’s ideas. No matter how you decide to determine your theme, be sure to look at the whole picture by asking questions like: What artistic or development challenges do you anticipate encountering? Can you overcome these challenges with the resources available to you? What does the competitive landscape look like? How can I monetize the game? Is there a gap in the market for a game like this one?

No other phase of game development allows for as much creative freedom as pre-production does. Fully formed ideas are not required at this point because there are still so many unknowns. So rather than focusing on the details, have fun brainstorming some themes, see which interests you the most, and then pick a viable option.

Define Your Target Audience

You cannot please everyone. I learned early on that everyone has a different set of preferences in what they look for from gaming experiences. What one person finds enjoyable, others find unenjoyable. Even within our team, each member has varying interests and preferences. This means there is no right or wrong answer to game design. Instead, define your target audience and design your game with them in mind.

With that said, a game’s playerbase is not limited to its user personas. Someone who does not identify with your outlined user personas may play and enjoy your game just as much as someone who fits that demographic perfectly. Still, when we need to make decisions, we must first think about our target audience and ask ourselves if it aligns with their desires and motivations.

Check out this recent Under the Microscope article to discover how we created user personas for Loam.

Do Your Research!

Play games—lots of them. And as you play them, replace your mindset and biases with those of your target audience. What about this game resonates most with its superfans? Analyze every element that comprises the gameplay and consider which details attracted its devoted players.

Loam’s pre-production phase took place during a time when the team was working 100% remotely. Using Discord, we played a new game together each week in a series of aptly named “Game of the Week” meetings. Different members of our team suggested titles like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Minecraft, Among Us, and Cook-out. The member that chose each week’s game would become the leader for that week’s play session, identifying their favorite parts of the game plus any potentially useful mechanics to keep in mind when making our own game. Not every game we played was within the same genre as ours, but we focused on specific aspects that we could use as prompts to start a conversation.

The team playing Phasmophobia during a special Halloween edition of Game of the Week.

If you are limited in resources or do not have access to certain games, then you’ll need to get creative. Find people on Twitch that stream relevant games and listen to what they have to say. Here, you will learn about your target audience’s motivations and where their frustrations lie within the current gaming landscape. If for no other reason, pre-production is underrated because its methods of data collection are so fun!

Figure Out How You Can Do It Better

Finding inspiration by observing how other games handle certain situations will save you time and frustration during development but avoid doing things the same way! Figure out how you can adapt and customize your findings to fit your game. Countless games are hitting the market each year, so yours needs to stand out. To do this, you must determine what your unique selling proposition will be. There must be something that makes your game more appealing to your target audience than the other games available today.

By no means should you have all the answers during pre-production, but you should start thinking about what you can do to make your game different. We accomplished most of our theorizing about Loam’s in-game mechanics and features during this stage of the development process. I suggest you consider prototyping these theories as needed and consider using temporary assets to speed up the process. We relied on our imagination and used cubes and cylinders as objects to determine whether or not the movements in VR felt natural and enjoyable.

Early game footage featuring temporary assets.

Bring the Vision Together

The Game Design Document (GDD) and concept art complement each other well to help your team fully realize their vision. From this point on, any game elements you have decided upon belong in the GDD. Our team uses Confluence to document EVERYTHING in our game. It is a living, constantly changing document that we use as our source of truth. Any team member can log into Confluence and easily find Loam’s latest updates, notes, and decisions, but keeping it organized is a team effort. Here, pre-production planning comes in clutch. Create your hierarchy and organizational strategy during pre-production to ensure that everyone who touches the document keeps within those confides. It was intimidating to start the GDD, but it was easy to build upon once we had the framework.

We started our GDD as a shared Word doc. Ultimately, this did not satisfy our needs, so we moved it to Confluence. If you find out a process or software does not work well for your team, change it! Confluence’s features were well worth the time it took to migrate the information there from Word. Partway through the pre-production process, we also switched our project management software to Jira. It works in tandem with Confluence, making it super convenient to connect tasks and reference design documentation. Be open to reevaluating how you are staying organized as a team because what you needed at the beginning stages may not cut it a few months into development.

Concept art is the second major piece of the puzzle when creating the vision for the game. Concept art isn’t used in the game as is; instead, it guides a game’s style throughout development. Our Art Director, Shelby, drew maps and sketched out sample game objects that helped define what the world of Loam looks like today. We had visual inspiration to reference, but our goal was to create something unlike anything we have seen before. 

Click here to dive deeper into how our art team created the look of Loam.

The concept art for Loam’s carrots, radishes, and leaves.

Logistics

The last part of pre-production that I’ll mention is logistics. By starting here, you may find your team better equipped to make decisions during other stages of pre-production. Whether or not you choose to begin pre-production with logistics, you should remember to consider the following points:

• Prioritize your must-haves. You will have to make compromises throughout the development process. Identify your non-negotiables early on to ensure you don’t lose focus.
• Plan your resources. If you are running a team, you should plan when people are available to work on the game.
• Budget your finances with your timeline in mind. Make sure you have enough funds to last through the duration of development with some left over to market the game. As fun as creating a game can be, you likely want people to play it. Keep that in mind when planning out your schedule and budget.