Devlog #7: Pre-Production

What's the deal with pre-production?

I'm sure folks could gather this from the name, but the pre-production phase of a project's life is essentially all the planning and preparation that a team does before production actually starts. This phase of development is key to any kind of successful project, much more than a lot of people realize. It's not just about having the technical skill necessary to get a piece of a project completed, it's about knowing who's making the piece, what resources would be needed for the piece, finding appropriate due dates for the piece, seeing what other pieces of the project are dependent on this piece, and a lot more. It's essential that important questions like that are found and answered during the pre-production phase, that way the production phase can go smoothly and without major hiccups.

How did my team's pre-production phase go?

For our project, my team had an entire semester's worth of time dedicated to pre-production. During this time, we found our teammates, developed our game concept further, established the game's design, placed each teammate into a dedicated role, and set up channels for communication and file sharing. Of course, we had a ton of tasks to do over the course of the semester, from writing documents like GDDs and team charters to setting up Trello boards. In my team, my two main roles are level designer and team manager. As a manager though, I had to be especially involved in these types of pre-production tasks, since so many of them involved evaluating our workload and managing team members accordingly. To me, our most challenging task was making the schedule for the second semester, which would be the production phase of development. It required a ton of prior insight to get right, and even after turning it in we were still making changes to it when we saw potential issues that could have arisen.