Full-cycle game development

A meeting for us to figure out all preliminary info: main things about your game, your expectations, budget, and schedule. After, we can create a basis for initial estimation.

At this stage, we make rough calculations based on the info you’ve given us and our previous experience within the required genre, tech stack, and timelines. We analyze each stage of game development according to your needs, the number of specialists you want to be involved in the project, the budget you expect to allocate, and so on. We conduct the starting estimation within one week after receiving all info about the game’s specs from you.

Pre-production is for us to sign MNDA, service agreements, assemble a skeleton team that will become the core of your project, and prepare main game documentation for further development. The most important among these documents are

• Game Design Document (GDD) with a comprehensive description of the game’s narrative with all branches, all its mechanics, loops, and ties. We use GDD to estimate a timeline for development and use it as a reference point in every aspect of our work.
• Visual Style Guide, in which you define required art style, character design configurations, required visual effects, color palettes, visual references, and so on.

This stage takes 2-3 months, depending on the complexity of the project. Sometimes the pre-production stage also includes the development of key game concepts.

Now that we know your story and the style you want to visualize it in, we can figure what elements of the game should be included in MVP for the soft launch.

Within gamedev, MVP, a Minimum Viable Product, is a game with, for instance, the first quest from the main storyline and a few of its substories. We release MVP to figure out how players would react to the world, narrative, and core mechanics.

Then, we can also estimate a budget, required to release MVP and extrapolate the numbers on the entire game. We deliver the final estimation within a week or two, once again — depending on the scope.

iLogos team starts developing the game. We report on our progress in the way that’s most comfortable for you. Usually we 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 of them is about two weeks on average. After 1.5-2 months of development, we start to show you our progress at the end of each cycle, so you could test, check, and, in general, give feedback on some of the functionality we’ve developed. After the third month, you can try the MVP version of the game and direct the process if that’s something you want.

The process is entirely transparent, and we provide reports via meetings (in any comfortable form for you) and project management software (usually Jira, but if you use something else, — we can easily adapt to it.)

Timelines depend on the scope of work.

A vertical slice is a test session for a few potential players that usually happens before the soft launch.

In our experience, games that use lots of experimental mechanics or narrative tricks or those that don’t have analogs on the market need that: you need to see players go through the first short session to figure out if they’re getting it.

It’s also often a vital step before pitching the game to a publisher: an outside perspective gives you a space to stop looking at features and start looking at the overall story — and answer questions publishers often ask (like “What story does this game tell? Why would anyone play it?” Unpleasant ones) You can ask these questions to your test players; you can also measure their engagement and observe them getting through your world. That will bring you (and our teams) lots of what to think about.

Often also called early access release, soft launch means the playable version of your game is ready to be tested. Soft launch contains a version of the game users can play several days — as opposed to a few hours of the vertical slice. First users will help us figure out the technical health of the game; observe the way people start and finish playing; get feedback from users — like actual words from random people who have perhaps registered for early access in Steam; capture first data.

Here, we release your game in its full scope, unhinged, as to say — as it was described in the GDD. We also do hotfixes we were able to catch during the soft launch — and apply users’ feedback. Everything works, players play, and the only thing that’s left is to go global — and maintain your game through the updates.

LiveOps supports the game after its release. This stage doesn’t require the entire team — but it could, if you want to continuously update the game in each of its aspects: engineering, data analytics, art, etc. Core responsibilities of LiveOps are to update content, fix bugs, optimize the game based on the feedback, run live events and sales in-game and out-of-game and react to players’ inquiries.

Our team is dedicated to continuous improvement — they are super invested in making players as happy as possible. This stage is also super important in terms of optimization and data analytics — when clients came to us for LiveOps services, we’ve managed to increase their engagement and revenue 5-10 times.