What to do before developing a game

What the talk is about

Alexander Shtachenko describes nine documents to prepare during pre-production, before writing code, hiring a team or approaching investors. It starts with an economic calculation: traffic cost, player lifetime, retention and monetization show whether a genre can pay back. Next come the game design document (setting, core mechanic, meta game, balance), a flowchart of player actions, an interface screen map, a document on acquisition, retention and monetization, social features, a prototype plan (core mechanic first, then alpha and beta), an art document and a technical one. He stresses that pre-production saves money, and that a wrong technology choice cost one project hundreds of thousands of dollars in his experience. Useful for producers, game designers and founders of mobile and social games.