The team focuses on answering critical questions to shape the initial concept and align it with desired brand development, ensuring a shared foundation for all stakeholders. They establish the game genre, target audience, game platforms, and key milestones & resources necessary for success. The goal here is to establish fundamental decisions needed to carry through to the concept phase.

Multiple mood boards are developed to explore theme, tone, and visual style while conducting a high-level pass on design, product goals and narrative approaches. The team maps out competitive analysis, core game design and product strategy. The goal is to review and gather feedback on documentation and select one mood board to pursue in the next milestone.

Original concept art is created for characters, props, and environments based on the selected mood board. Other explorations cover camera solutions, screen composition, and a first pass on all documentation, including game design, narrative and product strategy. The goal is to gather feedback on documentation and concept artwork and refine it.

We finalize game-quality art assets, key art, and game models to demonstrate a successful art direction. This phase also includes final game design, product strategy, narrative and art documentation, along with a working logo and branding assets. The goal is to finalize all aspects of art, UX, design, product, and narrative and present them to stakeholders.

A playable prototype is developed in the game engine to validate core gameplay, screen composition, and camera mechanics in a gray box form. This includes testing camera movement, interactions, and the core gameplay loop while continuing art, design, product, and engineering work in preparation for pre-production.

The focus transitions into full production preparation. This includes developing a feature roadmap, resource planning, efficient workflows for tech, design, art, UX, and narrative, as well as establishing tools, engine, and platform support. A key objective is to create a vertical slice to showcase core gameplay and mechanics.

The Production phase focuses on building out the full team and executing the feature roadmap defined in Pre-Production. Key activities include platform and feature development, content creation and pipeline setup, LiveOps planning, debugging tools for testing, and build pipelines. The ultimate goal is to deliver a cross-platform Alpha build, ensuring all core systems are functional and ready for further refinement.

During the launch phase we manage Alpha launches which can focus on technical testing and/or usability research, as well as soft launch or Beta launch to smaller segments or limited regions to understand the product’s baseline engagement, retention, monetization, and acquisition KPIs.

Post-launch we support optimizing KPIs as needed to support successful scaling. We have experience running A/B-A/B/C/D testing in game in order to find the best results between varying experiences, as well as build the needed tools, platforms, and analytics pipelines to get these learnings, and create white papers and briefs to encapsulate the results.

This team has 10+ years of experience together managing and optimizing the content creation and pipelines in the game at this phase. We are experts in developing seasonal experiences, ongoing events, and growing revenue and conversion in the monetization vector to maximize performance.