What are the responsibilities of a game designer in the pre-production phase?

Don’t sweat the small details yet. You need a vision first, something you can sell to executives and a starting point to sell the idea to a crucial audience: your team. Bring your team in during the concept phase, asking either for feedback or opinions. Manage them and ensure there are no conflicts and you’ll create an ever improving version as long as you keep iterating. The concept should have your Player as a focus, so you can measure any successive idea or change against that vision. Oh, and don’t discard any ideas. Some might not make the cut but you can write them down and save them for later!

Be ready to roll back to this stage at any moment af the pre-production stage. It is absolutely normal to do it several times. Development without the doubts is doomed. Try to think and describe thing from player perspective on this stage. What emotion is the core for your game? What is 2-3 main words, describing the setting?

In my experience, productive team meetings can make this phase one of the best moments in the development process. Building the documentation during concept discussion, will put minds at ease about the direction of the project. This will give everyone a sense of contribution and magnify the synergy.(no dev left behind!) Having a well put together prototype will not only make future game development more efficient, it will also help get the points made in your documentation across to whom it may concern. The best advice for this process in short, is to have fun.

You don't need to be a game designer to have a concept. Concepts can be seeded by mechanics, but also narratives, art styles, referents and genre inspirations. What game designers uniquely bring to a team are the skills to bring order to the chaos. Game designers bring processes and structure to problems, creatively translate goals to solutions, and apply their experience, analytical skills, and domain literacy to understand systemic relationships and experiential dynamics. You're there to make it playable, coherent, and effective. In a collaborative environment, you, as a game designer, should be as much a vector of support as creative contributor.

This phase is one I have grown into from child hood, I have always designed my own worlds. It was always D&D or Marvel. Concepts should be played right then as soon as you finish in board game form as well as map concepts at this point is it nessay to even make a virtual concept!

This stage is where a lot of games unfortunately fail even before they start. Scope definition needs to go hand in hand with not only your teams capacity but also your genre expertise. If you are for example building a match3 and you don't have a veteran from the genre you will be literally hitting a wall every step of the way. Some genres are more accessible than others, but also your scope can adapt to that. Don't try to innovate at all costs rather "borrow" wisely some parts that already work and innovate where it matters. Maybe you have a great idea for new core gameplay that evolves the genre? Pair it with proven progression so you mitigate the risk and focus where it matters. This essentially means that you already know your scope.

Knowing your players is crucial when setting goals in game development. A helpful approach is to break down similar games, really understanding what players enjoy in those experiences. By looking closely at these games, you can figure out what works well and not. This understanding can becomes the basis for deciding what to focus. In simple terms, this player-focused method is the key to setting clear, smart, and effective goals.

In the early stages of making a game, the second big job for a game designer is figuring out how big and complex the game will be. This means deciding what's in the game, like features and systems, and what's not. It involves setting goals, requirements, and considering limitations like budget and time. A smart way to do this is by understanding players - what they like in similar games. By looking at these games closely, This approach centered around understanding players guides our decision-making. It directs us on what aspects to prioritize, laying the groundwork for establishing clear and effective goals for the game.

"Scope is king". Over-scoping/Under-scoping a game can have a significant impact on the success of the game. Ensuring that the team has the capacity (financial, skill/talent, tools/tech and time) needed to deliver the game.

Feature can be changed while product has been reached the development phase even the production phase. Because sometimes you get a better idea of design while product is in production phase. The reason is when you start interacting with game mechanics and elements in a prototype, you start to get a better overview of it's design.

You can feel desire to skip this part or pass it quickly. Don't. Be ready to spend months, reworking theories and models again and again, in search of the best variant, every inch of which you know perfectly and there are no any unsolved cases. Also, make sure you do not spend time producing scalable content on this part. This is dangerous trap, which can take weeks and months of work and divide them by zero. Dont make content! Only models.

Feature design is a slippery slope in pre-production. While committing to a deep dive is usually what anyone would do, it’s better to work features through an iceberg approach. Design them at a high level, then go deep into specifics, measure how each one of them affects the totality of the Game and be ready to provide examples and references for each and every single one of those. General mechanics such as cameras and Input can be directly referenced from existing sources if you won’t innovate there. Save yourself some time! For the rest? Prototype only of necessary and at a high level. Find the fun, not the perfect implementation. Your role is to provide the goals, not set the road. Leave technical particularities to the team!

Learn to let go. Not all ideas will make it in the final cut. Although there may be certain attachments to certain ideas, the shelf is the best spot to place out of scope features. "Feature creep", is a phenomenon that occurs when things that were "cool" and seemed perfect for the project, impact the project in negative ways. My least favorite mistake to make in a professional setting.

While there’s some truth here, one key aspect of Worldbuilding is not only thinking about a product but about a franchise. How’s this game’s IP going to be used in the future? Books? Shows? Toys? All of these affect the design. Stories should feel familiar but both trivial. Conflict usually drives the narrative, even if it’s not violent and focuses on hardships (like in non-violent games). Finaly, it’s imperative you iterate over the connection between the world and the game. Whenever you add a mechanic to the game ask yourself questions like: - Does it make sense in the context of the game? - Do I have enough lore to commit to this? - What narrative do I need to push for this to happen? Nothing worse than mechanics making no sense.

At the heart of crafting a game is the enchanting task of weaving its narrative tapestry. As a game designer in the pre-production phase, my responsibility is to breathe life into the story, infusing it with context, meaning, and emotion. It's a journey through character creation, world-building, plot sculpting, and dialogue crafting—the art of narrating an immersive experience. In this creative odyssey, writing scripts, storyboards, and dialogues becomes a dance, a symphony where every word is a note, every scene a stroke on the canvas of imagination. Collaboration with fellow artisans—writers, artists, and voice actors—is akin to a magical alliance, where ideas meld to shape a captivating narrative universe.

Research your player, target and genre. Learn what makes them tick, remember that you are not creating a game for you or your taste, you are creating a game for others.

In Pre-production phase defining game UI/UX can be a little tricky as it requires a lot of skills to predict the exact UI before production. This can be achieved by UI prototyping and continuous iterations in it, until it reaches the development phase. In development phase, Product Lead/manager again has to validate the design as per game genre and potential target audience.

A game design document isn’t just a set of instructions for making the game. It’s like the memory of your design process. It’s not meant to directly tell everyone what to do; instead, it’s the go-to document when there’s a problem or something is unclear. It needs to have a lot of details and be kept up-to-date if your development process relies on the game design document.

Prepare your work site, this could be: Confluence, notion, Google sites, etc. But start creating the main sections for the game, sync up with you Art and Tech leads, make sure you are all in the same page when it comes to the arrangement of the documentation, the definitions of done, and the definition of success, you are the "northern star" of your team, you are there to guide the development of the project and the leadership of the team needs to work as a single unit.

The documentation process is a dynamic flow of presenting, pitching, and reviewing the game design. It involves captivating storytelling to the team, engaging presentations to clients and publishers, and meticulous reviews with testers. Each interaction is a moment to breathe life into the envisioned game. However, the true art lies in the collaboration that follows. It's about receiving feedback and incorporating changes, a continuous loop of refinement. This collaborative spirit extends to the entire development team, clients, publishers, and testers—a collective effort to mold the game into its best form.

In a nutshell, pre-production phase is make or break: 1. Visionary Choreography: It's like choreographing a dance; miss a step, and chaos ensues. 2. Prototyping Perfection: Prototypes are dress rehearsals, ironing out glitches before the big show. 3. Team Symphony: A band without harmony makes noise; a game without team coordination is chaotic. 4. Tech Teasers and Investor Confidence: Teasers are trailers; skipping this step is like releasing a film without a preview. 5. Market Research Brilliance: Releasing a hit song without knowing the audience is like game development without market research—a potential misfire. Skipping the pre-production phase is like entering a battle without a strategy—expect chaos and likely defeat.

Keeping the six responsibilities above in mind, a game designer's overarching responsibility is to make the game's main idea, message, and vision as clear as possible. In each of the six steps above you should keep this in mind, and execute them with this goal in mind. If you create all this documentation but in the end the team executing your vision understands something different, or the publishers you want to work with don't see the value, all the work was in vain.

When you begin a game project, you don't know if it is fun to play or not. At some point you find the fun parts and you focus on those areas and the development continues. However, you should never stop asking yourself, "can this be more fun?". There is always the possibility that more entertainment and reward can be squeezed out of the experience.