What Is Pre-Production?
Pre-production is the first phase in the production timeline. Good pre-production sets the tone for the entire rest of the project, and it should be a time of high creative energy and excitement. During pre-production, the scope, goals and plan for the entire project are established. This can make the edges of where pre-production ends, and production starts, a little hazy and hard to define. As with everthing in our exciting, cutting-edge, occasionally fustrating industry, nothing I say below should be taken as gospel, it will vary from project to project. Fundamentally, however, pre-production is the time in which the parameters for a game development project are decided, and a roadmap – from idea to prototype to shippable product – should be mapped out.
Pre-production is not just a time for throwing around wild ideas and goofing off for a few weeks, before starting the “serious” work. There should be structure and consideration given to pre-production as it ultimately sets the tone for the entire project. Good pre-production will give a project the best possible change to succeed and overcome problems that may be encountered once production is underway. Failure to give the project a good schedule and structure during pre-production simply stores up problems once production is underway, at which point the clock is already ticking, and everything going even slightly wrong becomes a major crisis! Pre-production should take approximately 10-20% of the total development time of the game, and should be thought of as time invested in upping the probability of future success.
During pre-production, the foundations of the project will be set. The high-level game concept should be finalised, including but not limited to the core story, the broad stokes of the art style, the basic mechanics and some key characters, the targeted release platforms and input devices, and the revenue model. A list of 'Required' features, and a list of 'Nice To Have' features, should be drawn up collaboratively and placed in a location, either digital or physical, that is accessible to all team members across all disciplines, so that it can be refined and referred to. If working with a stakeholder, such as a client or publisher, a list of their expected essential demands should also be acquired, considered and discussed. From these lists, a prototype of the concept should begin to take shape.
Once a prototype is agreed internally, the prototype should be put through a number of assessment processes. SWOT analysis is a good example of a simple analysis process, but more refined methodologies are available. The prototype should also go through an internal Competitive Analysis review, where the questions of what makes your game interesting, exciting, unusual and appealing should be considered objectively. Competitive Analysis should also consider the perspective of your stakeholders e.g. a client or publisher. Is your game a good fit for their catalogue? Have they greenlit things similar? Is your game too similar to the things that have been greenlit?
A budget for the concept should be written up, a tools list, and a staff list. The resources (money, people, equipment, software,etc) should be mapped against the required list of features and the anticipated quality/scope expectations of the stakeholders. Each feature should then be scoped out in term of time, and a resulting schedule should begin to manifest itself. The schedule should be reasonable and as accurate as possible – an informed guess, based on experience, with additional time built in. You should not plan to push the team into crunch from Day 1 (or ideally, at all!!) and the schedule should allow for some slippage due to unforeseen circumstances, or the extremely foreseeable feature creep. It is always better to have a bit of time spare to polish, than to be grinding your team into the floor because you had two days of snow and your entire calendar fell apart as a result.
After the concept documents, prototypes, budget, schedule, analysis/assessments and other documents are fully complete, they should be submitted to the stakeholder for review in the form of a pitch. If approved, congratulations! Take on the feedback and suggestions they give. If they have final approval over items such as the budget or release date, then this is the time to refine your documents in light of new, or newly confirmed, information. This will ultimately result in the GDD which you will attempt to work from over the course of the Production/Development process. You might spend as long working on Preproduction after approval as you do before it, refining and revising your plans to best suit all the information in front of you.
But this is only the beginning. Getting approval for your project does not set the contents of the documents in stone. This is perhaps one of the arguments why it is called Video Game Production rather than Project Management. Because you are not simply going to execute the carefully detailed plan you have written out, call it Production and have an easy time. Over the course of Production/Development, you will be called upon to make countless small adjustments all of your original plans, but most particularly to the schedule and features lists, in order to guide the project through to completion. Staff will become unwell, or skill up, or leave, or miss the bus on training day. The stakeholder may request a feature that makes the game better, or demand one that everyone except them knows will make the game worse, and time will have to be spent implementing that feature, and then taking it back out again! Tools will break, or become obsolete, or mysteriously skip a vital backup or download an update in the middle of the night that breaks all your code. Everything will go wrong, and then go right again, and then wrong, and then right. Production is the voyage across the stormy sea, and you cannot anticipate everything that will go wrong, but good pre-production work will help you prepare for the problems you did anticipate, and mitigate the problems you did not.
See Also:
The Pre-Production Problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukADFPuscG8
The Art of Pre-Production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2u4jhpZkTQ
Six Sigma Methodology & Game Development http://oniralia.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/six-sigma-methodology-and-game.html
Rise to Olympus: Pre-Production: http://emycul.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/rise-to-olympus-pre-production.html
