The entire development life cycle includes:
1. Pre-production. This is an advance preparation of concepts for a game. Primarily, a high concept is formulated – what is a game about? Besides, it is vital to specify game genres, features, plots, target audience, platforms, approximate schedules, marketing analysis, team requirements, and risk analysis.
2. Design. All the game concepts and other elements of gameplay are worked out in detail at this stage. As a result, a clear game design document (GDD) with all the necessary details is created for the development team.
3. Development. This is a stage when programming comes into the game development process. Games developers write code to implement all the ideas previously mentioned in GDD.
4. Testing. Testers ensure that all the features are available and work correctly in the game. Even small changes to the code base can lead to unexpected changes in different parts of the game. So, it is crucial to test a game before its release.
Simply put, it is necessary to take an idea or concept for a game and develop, program, design, visualize, record, mix, produce, test, before launching a full game on the market.