ABSTRACT
The team needs to keep iterating and experimenting to solve thorny problems while allowing the asset creators and production team to keep moving towards the eventual ship date. At some point, the pressure to make rather than to experiment has become overwhelming, and the game is finally in production. The production phase often combines both pre-production and production. The purpose of the production phase is to get to the launch phase. Alpha and beta tests are relics of the era of production-centric design. A designer tweaking the speed of a monster, for example, starts to break the animation that has already been produced so the monster can appear to be lurching towards the player, not striding. At some point, the advantages to be gained for the project by the rapid iteration of pre-production are outweighed by disadvantages caused by the communication flow and disruption of dependencies in the team.
