We all love and enjoy them nearly every day. Some of us can’t live without them. I’m talking about games. In this series of “Introducing to the game industry” I want to explain you the workflow big companies, or in this special case “Studios”, use, to create a game.

The workflow (or “pipeline ”) which you can interactively examine on http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=16241564, gives you a little sniff of the whole game pipeline (also in Film.) Generally, the workflow is divided into four categories:

• Design / Concept
• Pre-Production
• Production
• Post-Production

This first chapter will deal with the Concept (Basically, the shortest work for a studio) and Pre-Production.

The Concept

The most important part of a game is the concept. If the concept is good, of course, you notice. It decides the genre and the story of the game, furthermore how the game should be played (e.g. perspective, control) as well as environment and characters.

This directly leads us to the Pre-Production.

Pre-Production

In the pre-production a studio tries to visualize the concept. Exactly here, we have many similarities with the film industry (animation films).
But what are these similarities?  The biggest similarity is the creation of characters. If you can feel with a character you will keep playing, you will feel with the game, or a film, and if you find some similarities with the character and you, you will like the game or film.

We should mention some examples, shouldn’t we?

Bioshock Infinite
The Last of Us
or for the older ones of us Zelda

Some discussion are needed here 😀

So, usually studios visualize their concept with Concept-Arts

Character:

The first picture shows you an illustration of Elizabeth from Bioshock, you see exactly the decisions the “Character-Team” did, to create a unique character. But the outer appearance isn’t the whole thing. They have also to think about the movement and the voice a character have, which decides if you like a character or not.

Very, very sweet…

Environment:

http://conceptartworld.com/?p=21812

I love concept arts, becasue they always refreshes the feeling I had as I played the game , but the actual use of concept arts are different. Artists often draw a scene from more than one perspective, so that Level artists can easily build a whole level from scratch.

I hope you got a rough start into the game industry, but of course there is much more than that I mentioned for pre-production.

In the next article I will explain the category “Production”, which is the most technical part. I will be very precise how a game works, and why games are limited concerning graphics, FPS and development.

Greetings, Lyian