When you sit down to play any video game on your console at home, it may not dawn on you the steps it has taken to make and produce that game that is in your machine. There are many elements in the video game services world from the initial phases of designing the game to game programming, right through to the testing and finally the game appearing on the shelves at your local store. Each of these subsets of the game development process is important in its own way. The design for any game is done at the outset when users, programmers and developers are discussing the planning for the game and who it will appeal to on the market. Next comes the programming phase where the game is actually created and developed by a specific team working against a set of specifications. The final stage before you see it in a store is the testing phase where professional testers will try to break the product before it goes live. Their job is key as they are the last line of defense before the game goes out into the world to be purchased by the paying customer.

With any game development this always starts with the game design stage. This process involves designing the content of the game and the rules based on a pre-determined set of instructions from the business. Everything from characters, storyline and environment, to name but a few will be addressed and designed here. If you are a designer then you will need some artistic and technical expertise to make the ideas come alive. This design will start off with just an idea and develop into something more concrete that can be developed. This is one of the most critical stages of the whole development process. If you get this wrong then the game may not be a success.

After the design stage of the development lifecycle then it comes down to the programming. This is where the ideas and designs are taken and actually put into operation with a series of lines of code that run behind the scenes when the game is played. These lines of code will tell for example a character to perform a certain action or talk to another character in game. It is at this stage of the process that the game starts to take shape towards the finished product that will be sold.

The final phase before the game is marketed and packaged up ready for sale is the video game testing element of the process. This is perhaps the most vital of all the phases as without this department then there is no way of knowing if a game is ready to be played or is full of bugs. It is the job of the tester to ensure that there are no glaring mistakes in the code that prevent the game from working correctly. These issues are then reported and fixed by the developers ready to be re-tested to check that everything is okay.

In summary, the process of developing a game is fairly straightforward. The tough part is the actual elements of that process from design through to testing and then marketing. All the areas are key to the overall success of any video game and without all three of these then the game would fail.