This is the state where the pre-production comes into play and starts laying the foundation. This step is like figuring out the blueprint of a house, before hiring a construction crew and starting to build. Here you can also shed light on all the aspects you are considering for your game, and explore the possible avenues.
It is much faster and cheaper to try everything out and do all the mistakes, when working with a team of 8 in pre-production instead of a team of 800 in production.
A small lean team can quickly adapt and change the direction until the concepts are just right, while a delay in full production can waste the time/work of hundreds of people. Just imagine the difference in changing a sketch of a city versus changing the structure of a fully modelled city that has been built in the game engine.
At this point you need to know, or find out, where you are in the process, as the team doing the pre-production needs to know what kind of deliveries you need. The size of the task is vastly different depending on what you need:
- pitch material, if you’re looking for funding
- design of the game world and environment
- just ideas and exploration
- inspiration and mood pieces for the team
- a clear roadmap to get started
- a set of main characters
- a single prop or scene
- detailed concepts for each scene and prop in the entire game, that modellers will base their work on
We find it great to start out with a workshop or a long meeting, where we’re given all the material, mood boards, design documents and talk through the scope of the project while sketching out core concepts. Then follow up with regular meetings to be able to discuss the findings of sifting through the clients material as well as getting feedback on the developed concepts.