How Professional Company Creates Video Games

In the world of games, each company has a different approach, but most share the same general workflow. It all starts with a game designer. Game designers write the documents that put the process in motion. They design themes, characters, mechanics, even complete worlds that create the foundation of a game. This is all in the game design document.

But before we get into making them, let's talk about what a video game is.

At its core, a game is a player's interaction with a combination of art and sound. So let’s look at art. An art team can consist of: concept artists, 3D modelers, frontend artists, technical artists, and more - all lead by an art director. Now sound - the people responsible for music and sound include composers, sound designers, audio engineers, voice actors, and music supervisors who act as the conductors. Now that makes 2 parts of this combination. The third of course is the player that interacts with the game.

What lets you interact with the game? The answer is code!

The fourth element is software engineers. They come in too many specializations to name, but here’s a few: there's gameplay engineers - they make sure that the characters move and act like you want them to. there's server engineers - they make sure that your scores are saved to the leaderboards. And rendering engineers - they squeeze the most out of your console and PC.

So what does a cycle look like?

Well, a game designer will write a game design document. An artist will read the document and start drawing away. A sound designer will read the document and start creating sounds. A software engineer will also read the document and start programming gameplay. This leaves us with the last piece.

How do the 4 work together so seamlessly?

The person running this show is the producer. The producer organizes, delegates, keeps track of progress, puts out fires, and makes sure the ship keeps going. Now in building modern games, there are multiple people per team in a cycle, and multiple cycles happening at once. The bigger the game, the bigger the bugdet, and of course the bigger the team. And then there’s also upper management, QA, marketing, HR, finance, legal, localization and more.