Video Game Production and Game Testers

The endless hours of entertainment that they bring is all due to the hard work of many talented artists, skilled artisans, programmers, and game testers collaborating to create something new and exciting. In fact, if you look closely, you will find that video game production rivals that of a Hollywood movie. They can both offer a balance of action and comedy, suspense and romance, athleticism and leadership. The wide world of game designusually begins with an idea. This might be a story created by a celebrated writer or it might be an adaptation of an existing property like a movie. Actually, it is very common for game developers to take successful movies and design a video game in honor of it, which helps to move the franchise forward. Sometimes the game fits directly in with the story told by the movie and sometimes it is another chapter in the life of the protagonist. Either way, it is usually a good choice to make as characters with a strong, established fan base can often perform very well in many forms. Once this idea is expanded to cover the whole scope of the desired length of a game, it is then fleshed out, so to speak. One of the next steps in game development is casting the actors who will play the voice roles in the game. Of course, this is typically only used in action and role playing games, as they usually have the most involving story, but other games use voice talent too. These actors are just like those for an animated show or motion picture. They meet and rehearse, discuss the characters with the director and interact with the other actors to get a feel for the pace of the dialogue as well as the intrigue of the plot. Another group of people who are very important to game design are the graphic artists. Obviously, you can’t have a video game with a graphics department. These are the people who take the world that was established by the writers and transform it into a real set. They are also responsible for rendering the characters, which are often based on human models. In the end, they bring it all together with the software they program. Finally, as the game starts to reach levels of playability, it is passed to the game testers. This is a very important department for one reason: quality control. They are really the only ones who play the game as a consumer would. They make critiques and pass them back to the programmers and designers so that they can make changes to fix glitches, improve the look and feel, and work out the kinks in the story or game design. When the game testers are happy, though, the game can go into production and be distributed to retailers for consumer purchase.