How Video Games Are Made
Overview
Games are difficult and complicated things to make, and can cost a lot of money. The bigger the game, the more people are required, and the more specialised roles become. Game developers and publishers use a fairly standardised process to split the development cycle into stages, with milestones that need to be completed on time in order to stay in-budget and on-schedule.
It’s worth understanding how the broader process works, as your responsibilities and tasks will change throughout this cycle, so understanding the general shape of the process now can help you be prepared to enter a full cycle of development and know what lies ahead.
This article by Nadia Stefyn provides an amazing overview of the production process and its various stages: https://www.cgspectrum.com/blog/game-development-process
I also highly recommend Riot Games’ So You Wanna Make Games? series, that shines a light on the many disciplines that go into making a game: https://youtu.be/RqRoXLLwJ8g
Here is an awesome summary of the different job roles you might encounter in game development, and how they relate to our work in game audio: https://www.asoundeffect.com/game-audio-glossary-development-roles/
And if you are interested in getting an even deeper insight into all those different roles, I highly recommend watching Massive Entertainment's Fika Sessions. They are a series of in-depth conversations with game developers about their job roles: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7q7ZUkmTC8ah8MnOWdMOt2aLDHFwBokn
Publishers
Publishers play huge a part in the games industry, as they are the ones who offer up the money to fund the development of games, unless a studio is self-funded. Depending on the type of agreement, a publisher might also be responsible for a number of other tasks like providing localisation, QA testing, marketing and distribution, to name a few.
Here is a great short explanation of what games publishers do: https://www.screenskills.com/job-profiles/browse/games/production/games-publisher/
And some interesting thoughts on the relationship between publishers and game developers: https://youtu.be/4L8UGWFzicQ
