How Video Games Are Made: The Development Process Explained

Every commercial video game, from a small mobile puzzle to a sprawling open-world release, is built through a broadly similar production pipeline. According to the English-language Wikipedia entry on video game development and industry training site CG Spectrum, that pipeline is usually described in three stages: pre-production, production and post-production.

Pre-production: planning before anything is built

Pre-production is where a game idea becomes a plan. Teams write a high concept — a one- or two-sentence description of the game — followed by pitch and concept documents that cover genre, gameplay, setting and target audience, according to Wikipedia. The central output of this stage is the Game Design Document (GDD), a blueprint covering mechanics, story, characters, art direction and user-interface concepts. CG Spectrum notes that the GDD is a 'living document' that keeps changing, sometimes daily, as development continues.

Small prototypes are also built during pre-production to test whether core gameplay ideas work. CG Spectrum estimates this phase can last anywhere from one week to one year and typically accounts for up to 20% of a project's total development time; according to Wikipedia, this phase is usually not funded directly by a publisher, though publishers may still require developers to produce planning documents during it.

Production: the longest phase

Production is where the bulk of the work happens: code is written, art assets are created, levels are built, audio is recorded and systems are tested. Wikipedia and CG Spectrum both describe this as the longest stage, commonly lasting one to four years depending on a game's scope. CG Spectrum adds that modern PC or console titles typically take three to five years in total, while mobile games can be finished in a matter of months.

Large studio teams working on this stage can exceed a hundred people, according to CG Spectrum, with artists usually forming the biggest group, followed by programmers, designers and audio specialists, plus one to three producers in management roles. Development commonly passes through internal milestones — prototype, first playable, vertical slice, alpha, beta and 'gold master' — the version that is finalized for release.

Post-production: launch is not the finish line

After a game ships, teams enter post-production: fixing bugs reported by players, releasing patches, and in many cases building downloadable content (DLC) or post-launch updates, according to Wikipedia. CG Spectrum also notes studios often hold post-mortem debriefs to document what worked and what didn't for future projects.

Who actually builds a game

Game development teams combine several specialist roles. Career-advice site Indeed and Wikipedia describe the core functions as follows:

• Game designer – creates gameplay mechanics, rules, challenges and often the storyline; lead designers act as the project's creative visionary, per CG Spectrum and Indeed.
• Programmer – writes the code that makes the game run on a given platform and integrates art and audio into the playable build, according to Indeed.
• Artist – concept artists, 3D modelers, animators and FX artists create the game's visual look, overseen by an art director, per Wikipedia.
• Level designer – builds individual levels and paces difficulty using specialized editing tools, according to Indeed.
• Sound engineer – produces sound effects, music and voice mixing, per Indeed and Wikipedia.
• Tester / QA – repeatedly plays the game to find and document bugs before release, according to Indeed.
• Producer – manages schedules, budgets, contracts and communication between the development team and a publisher, per Wikipedia and Indeed.

Timelines, budgets and tools

Budgets vary enormously by project scale. CG Spectrum notes that artwork alone can absorb 75–90% of a game's budget, and cites Grand Theft Auto V as an example of a high-end title that reportedly cost about $137 million to develop plus a further $128 million to market. Wikipedia states that overall game development costs have risen from roughly $1–3 million in 2000 to more than $200 million for some titles by 2023.

Most studios build games with existing game engines rather than writing everything from scratch. Wikipedia names Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot as commonly used engines, with C++, C#, Java and Python among the frequently used programming languages. Common development methods include agile, Scrum and iterative prototyping, often mixed with more linear 'waterfall' planning for fixed assets.

How the process is changing

A 2025 State of the Game Industry survey of more than 3,000 developers, conducted around the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and reported by trade outlet Game Developer, found that 11% of respondents had been laid off in the previous year and 41% said they had felt the impact of layoffs directly or indirectly. The same survey found that 52% of developers work at companies that use generative AI tools and 36% personally use such tools, even as 30% of respondents — up from the prior year — said they believe AI is having a negative effect on the industry, citing concerns such as intellectual-property use, energy consumption and output quality.

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