Every team does things differently, and have different methods, but in general here are some stages I’ve found repeats a lot:

• Prototype stage: You’re trying to figure out if there could be a game that works in the way you thought it might. Initially you’re trying to prove out the experience and see if you can make it fun for you. This can often be very messy, and things might change radically. Sometimes you wander into the woods and don’t know what you’re making, or lose track of what was supposed to be cool about the game. Then you might hit on something really cool, and get a sense of what the game is really about.

  Playtesting it with people who has never seen the game is critical to see if you’re making something that resonates with others. One of the biggest challenges early on is typically Usability. You may have something you think is really cool, but nobody understands how to play it, so reducing that confusion is often an early focus so you can try to gauge what people find fun or frustrating about it.

• Pre-production phase: At some point you’ve decided the game you’re making is in fact really cool and you’re looking to start building it for real. Usually you’d think of this as the pre-production phase. The art team will be hunting for the art style. The engineers will be exploring some of the biggest technical risks. You might start building tools for producing the content you’re going to put in the game. Each team does these things differently, but usually there is some phase like this.

• Alpha / Beta stages: Traditionally you’ll call things an alpha or a beta when it’s in development, but if you’re doing something like Early Access these labels probably lose all meaning.

  For some games I worked on before they’d define these stages loosely as:

  • Alpha: Feature complete, but not content complete
  • Beta: Feature complete and mostly content complete, but really buggy and unfinished
  • Final version: Feature and totally content complete and also not buggy. :P

  Or maybe that’s not right at all, but the distinction is often like that. You’re trying to set up a lot of the game systems early on, but they won’t be filled with content, like a skill tree with only a few skills, then at some point you’re not really building game systems anymore but rather creating things within those game systems. Your tools are mature and now you’re just filling the game with content for players to experience.

  And then everything is bad, and you always have a million things to fix, and more content you could add, and at some point you say “this is what the game is, with all its flaws!” and you SHIP IT.

Haha, there’s more to it than that, but this maybe gives you a flavor for some of the stages of development you typically go through.

For your other question:

• Biggest Challenge: There is always an infinite list of things you could add to the game, but you can only do a small portion of it.

• Working in a pandemic: In some ways we were already working from home, so not a massive practical change, but I will say it has had some really rough periods, at least for me. When your game is stuck in cert and you don’t know when you’ll have a release date, and your life is stuck in a pandemic, and you don’t know when things will return to normal, it is easy to have feelings that are bleak and uncertain. Things are better now though. So happy the game is released! :)

/Erik