Full-cycle game dev
Assemble a team to design a beautiful, engaging, and terribly exciting world for your fantasies. Or a straightforward shooter in gray, grimy hallways. Or any other game. We do full-scale game development, using this medium as a way to create something new, funny, scary, touching – to create a story. We’ve been doing this for over 15 years, and we’re sure there are more stories to invite players into.
Services and expertise
Bringing game ideas to life:
- Established game development teams with extensive product experience covering all production needs for full-cycle game development, including in-depth technical knowledge in most game engines such as Unity, Unreal Engines and proprietary engines.
- Comprehensive market analysis, game design documentation, and art style definition
- Rapid prototyping of key mechanics and core gameplay elements.
- Iterative, flexible production cycle based on game development milestones
- Soft launch and post-release
- Community management
Creating the right game for your IP:
- Find the perfect match between the ideas you have intellectual property or license for and the players who would like to explore them.
- Work with a team that has processes in place to work with intellectual property owners and get approvals quickly, knows everything about developing games based on intellectual property, and is ready for tedious market research, early game trials, and agile community management.
- Our expertise is in creating popular IP-based games based on The Simpsons, Cat in Boots, Star Trek, etc.
The process of development
Step 1: First Touch.
A meeting for us to find out all the preliminary information: the main thing about your game, your expectations, budget and schedule. After that, we can create the basis for the initial evaluation.
Step 2: Initial Evaluation
In this step, we make rough estimates based on the information you’ve given us and our previous experience within the required genre, technology stack, and timeline. We analyze each stage of game development according to your needs, the number of specialists you want to involve in the project, the estimated budget, and so on. We conduct a kick-off evaluation within one week of receiving all the information from you about the characteristics of the game.
Step 3: Pre-production
Pre-production consists of us signing MNDAs, service agreements, assembling the core team that will be the core of your project, and preparing the core game documentation for further development. The most important among these documents are
A game design document (GDD) detailing the game’s narrative with all its branches, all its mechanics, loops and connections. We use the GDD to assess the development schedule and use it as a guide in every aspect of our work.
A visual style guide in which you determine the art style needed, character design configurations, visual effects needed, color palettes, visual references, etc.
This stage takes 2-3 months, depending on the complexity of the project. Sometimes the pre-production phase also includes the development of key game concepts.
Step 4: Final Evaluation
Now that we know your story and the style in which you want to visualize it, we can understand what elements of the game should be included in the MVP for a soft launch.
In gamemaking, an MVP, a minimally viable product, is a game that has, for example, the first quest of the main storyline and several sub-stories of it. We release the MVP to figure out how players will respond to the world, the narrative, and the core mechanics.
Then we can also estimate the budget needed to release the MVP and extrapolate the numbers to the entire game. We do a final estimate within a week or two, again – depending on volume.
Step 5: Development.
The team begins development of the game. We report our progress in whatever way you feel most comfortable. We usually use Agile methodologies, but the project manager assigned to your game development team, as well as GD, producers and leads, will change the workflow if you need it.
We develop the game in cycles, increments, and each one averages about two weeks. After 1.5-2 months of development, we start showing you our progress at the end of each cycle so you can test, check, and generally leave feedback on some of the features we’ve developed. After the third month, you can try the MVP version of the game and manage the process if you want.
The process is completely transparent and we provide reports via meetings (in whatever form you want) and project management software (usually Jira, but if you use something else – we can easily adapt to it).
Deadlines depend on the scope of the work.
Step 6: Vertical Slice
A vertical slice is a test session for a few potential players, and usually takes place before the software launch.
In our experience, games that use a lot of experimental mechanics or plot tricks, or those that are unparalleled on the market, need this: you need to see how players go through the first short session to see if they understand it.
It’s also often a vital step before presenting a game to a publisher: looking from the outside gives you the opportunity to stop looking at features and start looking at the story as a whole – and to answer the questions publishers often ask (e.g., “What story is this game telling? Why would anyone want to play it?” Nasty) These are questions you can ask your testers; you can also measure their engagement and observe how they go through your world. This will bring you (and our teams) lots of topics to think about.
Step 7: Soft Launch.
A soft launch, also often referred to as an early access release, means that the game version of your game is ready for testing. A soft launch contains a version of the game that users can play for a few days – as opposed to a few hours of vertical cutscenes. First-time users help us understand the technical state of the game; watch people start and finish playing; get feedback from users – like actual words from random people who may have signed up for early access on Steam; and capture early data.
Step 8: Release.
Here we release your game in its entirety, so to speak, in disassembled form – as described in GDD. We also make the hotfixes we were able to catch during the soft launch, and apply user feedback. Everything works, players play, and all that remains is to go global – and maintain your game through updates.