The Stages of Game Development

Consider this your game developer support group.

Making games is hard. But indies all over the world are doing it anyway.

Adriaan de Jongh (Hidden Folks) travels the globe chatting up developers like Amanita Design, Compulsion Games, and Night School Studio to find out what drives their passion for making games. The four-part series ships March 23.

While we wait for DevQuest to ship, we wanted to talk about the stages of game development. Sometimes game development is a challenging, painful process — but nothing compares to seeing the pure elation of someone experiencing your game for the first time. We spoke to game developers and boiled down the game development process to the following five stages: Prototyping, progress, ship, watch, and repeat. Whether you’re experiencing the inspiring first moments of prototyping or progressing through the painstaking labor of love that we call development, every stage is part of a developer’s quest to craft a lofty idea into a tangible reality with art, design, storytelling, and of course, code.

What stage are you in? Share your stage by sharing one our tweets below.

The full DevQuest series is now live. Follow Windows Developer for the latest updates and catch a sneak peek right here:

Still want more? Learn all about game development on Windows 10 right here.