Traditional milestone structure

While each studio and game producer can have their own way of running a project, a variation of the traditional set of milestones and production phases (borrowed from the movie industry) is employed by most:

• Concept phase: An idea is born! A concept document (usually in a form of a 5-20 slide presentation) is created and pitched to key stakeholders. If the project is given the go-ahead, the initial preproduction team is assembled and tasked with expanding the concept.
• Preproduction: A crucial period where the most important design decisions are likely to be made. Core gameplay mechanics are being validated by prototyping. The game's scope, art direction, technical requirements, production schedule, and team size are all being established. At the end of preproduction, the GDD should be finalized by the designer and approved by key stakeholders.
• Production: The team begins to execute on the agreed design, writing production-quality code, art assets, and content. As a rule of thumb, the further the game is into production, the harder it becomes to make large changes in product design.
  • Pre-alpha: Depending on the length of the project, several interim production milestones are usually set, with the aforementioned Vertical Slice often being one of them. These give the team a defined mid-term goal to work towards and are useful even if there is no publisher (and therefore payment) associated with them.
  • Alpha: At the end of the Alpha stage, the product should be feature-complete, meaning the game is playable from start to finish (should it have one) with all functionalities and content roughly in place. That said, the quality will be far from final, with many bugs left to be fixed and various improvements and changes to be made, often based on the results of playtesting.
  • Beta: Beta represents a much more complete version of the game. In theory, all of the content is locked in place and the only changes being made from there on are bug fixes, balancing changes, tweaks, and polishing. Some companies will conduct public beta tests that are either closed (invite only) or open to everyone.
  • Gold candidate: Once all important issues have been addressed, a release candidate can be approved by the publisher to put the game on the path to distribution! The gold status itself goes back to the old practice of creating a GM (Gold Master)—a version of the game that would be signed off and used for mass duplication of the final product.
  • Release: It's time to celebrate! Your game has beaten the odds! Making games is hard and expensive, and the vast majority never see the light of day.
• Post-release: Depending on the post-release support plan, the team will either drop the milestone structure and handle improvements and additions on a sprint-by-sprint basis or create additional milestones around the creation of DLC (downloadable content) and larger expansions.