Most successful games start with a prototype. What you need to remember about a game prototype is that it follows “The cheapest way to be fun” rule. Sometimes our ideas sound great, but when you lay it down on a gamepad, the fun goes away. Many prototypes don’t make it to the production and this is perfectly fine, because game development is not cheap and the sooner you understand that your game doesn’t engage players, the more money you’ll save for the next prototype.

It is always good to Remember: Video Game development and Game Pre-production starts ONLY AFTER the Prototyping phase. If the idea is not fun to play, there’s no need to invest into retail code, visuals and other assets. Throughout our game development outsourcing career, we have created a hundred of concepts and prototypes, so we know exactly how to make this phase effective in every way, including costs.

Every game (even, the simplest one) contains a lot of code. Custom code. Games, being products of a creative nature, share little code, leave alone game engine and some toolchains, so when you start building a new game, you literally start from scratch.

A game’s codebase can easily reach 50,000-100,000 lines of code. While the number of code lines is not in anyway a quality metric, believe us - 100,000 lines of custom, logic-related code is a lot. It is absolutely not the same as equal amount of code lines for a traditional software. When this code is not well-organized, it becomes extremely hard to maintain. Our team with more than 15 years of AAA and casual games development experience knows how to keep such large projects under control.

When it comes to product release, it is always a hassle of syncing releases between multiple platforms, communicating with publishers, completing various Requirements Checklists. When a game release is already scheduled and the product is still in bad shape, communicating with the parties that handle promo and release can be very stressful.

Having released a number of games through both self-publishing and 3rd party publishers, we know how the process works and can help you organize it to ensure swift product launch. This includes but not limited to Soft Launch, when a game is released to a limited audience to make sure, no critical flaws exist, A/B testing for monetization and other applicable gameplay mechanics, where the best performing combinations are discovered.

Launching a product is just the beginning; in order to achieve long-lasting success, it is necessary to keep in touch with your audience, respond to their feedback and further enhance the game with post-release features, such as downloadable content, new languages and platforms support, refining monetization and gameplay balance in order to find the most appealing and profitable combination.

Also, sad as it might sound, nowadays there are a lot of bugs to fix in the games after release - these take a considerable amount of time and distract from further project development. Therefore, in order not to grow the team for a product with uncertain financial outcome, it is often reasonable to either have a short-term external team in order to do further development or support while there’s a need for this.