Pre-Production

Pre-Production

What is Pre-Production?

Pre-production is planning before making a product. However this is not just used in games design it is used in many other media production. Examples of media that use pre-production is film, television,  advertising (photo-imaging, cinema, television and print, etc.), games development, internet, radio, press, interactive media and print.

 

Finance

When companies begin to plan making a game they usual come up with a budget so that they know what they can spend and they have a rough idea of what they are going to spend the money on. These types of things may be equipment such as PC's, consoles, software, sound and motion captures, facilities, employees, etc. When making a game transport is important. For instance if you want to sell your game to everyone then you will need to travel all around to advertise your game to everybody involved. Furthermore you may have multiple locations in facilities to travel to, this obviously cost money, so companies need to take that into consideration. If an employee is highly talented at their job, then the company will have to pay that employee an substantial wage in order to maintain them within their company. To gather a crew together to make a game will cost money, in wages, bonuses etc. A real-life example of a company making a profit is Rockstar making GTA 5 for a combined cost of £170 million. This is taking everything into consideration.

Rockstar's GTA 5 in action.

Time

Similar to making a budget in finance, with time you have to make a deadline to when you are going to get your work done by. The reasoning for this is so that everything is done efficiently and everybody is working to get something done by a certain time. When setting a deadline companies would need to consider the availability of equipment, this could be for example when they are using a computer what if that computer breaks down. They would need to consider this to make sure that they don't go over. They would also need to availability of personnel for example if somebody gets ill and is unable to attend the company may take longer to produce something. This would then add to the deadline date. An example of deadline in real-life not working is when GTA was originally supposed to be released in March 2013 but was delayed because of most likely one of the reasons above to September 2013.

GTA 5 front cover.

Personnel

It is very important that when a company employees a team they employee the right amount of people so that the company doesn't get too big or cost too much to run. When employing people the company that is employing has to consider what roles they need to employ. For example they don't need to employ more of something they need, this would cost them way too much which would then go over their budget. When they employee somebody they are looking at the have to consider what skills they have and how they would develop the company to grow accordingly to how they want, to succeed in making their game. Again they would have to consider the availability of the people they are employing, for example if they need some time off they need to have back up of people to replace that person. Finally they would have to take in account the cost of wages of that person so that they don't go over their budget.

Employment

Facilities

A company would need to either hire or buy a property the right property so that the company has the required space needed so that all of their workers/employees can work on their game successfully. At this place of work they would have to have work space that would have PC's, sound and motion captures and many other things such as green screens. So it is important that they buy or hire the right property. As well as making the game, they would also have to produce the game and sell it. So they have to buy or hire the right property in order to produce the game as well, this is mass production of the product that they are producing. Furthermore the accessibility of the property must be good as well so that all the employees can get there easily and quickly so that the product/game can be made successfully. Turn 10 studio's have a facility in where pretty much everything is done in one building.

The Turn 10 studio's.

Contributors

When creating a game you might want a celebrity to promote or be in the game. This would be a well liked celebrity so that the game would get more publicity. This would essentially sell more copies of the game because of the fan base of that celebrity might also buy the game along with people/gamers that generally buy that genre of game frequently. A real-life example of this is Ellen Page when she featured in Beyond Two Souls. Because of her act in the game the game became more known publically and sold more copies than it expected to.

Ellen Page in her sequel of games.

Locations

For a company when choosing a location for a company, the company will need assess whether the location is suitable for everybody at the business. For example, if you picked a location in Scotland and most of their employees lived in London this wouldn't be suitable for everybody to take a journey to Scotland everyday. So the company need to think logically about where they are to locate. The company might want to travel around to take inspiration from locations for their game. For example a British company may travel to America to get inspiration for a game they were creating that was set in America. However this doesn't always go as planned, for example the weather may not be what they want. This then may take longer than planned to capture what they wanted from that location. For example The Crew design the base of their map is the whole of America with real landmarks placed in real places.

 

 

Codes Of Practice And Regulation

Having created a game the company would have to go through stages of signing legal documents so that there is proof of no copyright infringements. Legal codes of practice will cover any injuries to the general public, as long as there was a risk assessment before the injury had taken place. Furthermore completion insurance which is used in independence financial productions. This guarantees the producer will deliver the product to the distributor and the money will then be transferred to the producer from the distributor.

OFCOM
This stands for Office of Communication. This looks after TV, Radio, Mobiles, Postal Service and Telecoms. They protect the public from harmful content shown own on such things as above.

ASA
This stands for Advertising Standards Authority. Their job is to analyze all advertisement before it is shown to the public, to stop any offensive content that could be shown. If the advertisement even receives just on bad complaint the advert pulled out of the publics view and goes into investigation.

ESRB
This stands for Entertainment Software Rating Board. This is the American and Canadian version PEGI. They play and rate all games before they are released to the public to buy to decide on an age rating. An example would be if the game includes bad language it will likely be at least an 12+. Furthermore if a game is violent and contains drugs or sexual content it is most likely going to be an 18+.

PEGI
This stands for Pan European Game Information. This is the European equivalent to ESRB. They rate games in a similar way to ESRB. They decide on a age rating, depending on violence level or graphical content.

References

http://www.examiner.com/article/gta-5-reveals-hot-fix-patch-for-gta-online-money-freezing-exploit
(Wednesday 1 October 2014 | 15:18) - I used a picture posted on this website of GTA.

http://onlyfullgames.com/gta-5-demo-download-pc-gta-5-demo-download-game/
(Wednesday 1 October 2014 | 15:50) - I used a picture posted on this website of the GTA cover.

http://www.jber.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-120217-043.jpg
(Wednesday 1 October 2014 | 15:52) - I used a picture posted on here for a picture illustrating employment.

http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2011/06/07/exclusive-behind-the-scenes-at-turn-10-studios-and-the-making-of-forza-motorsport-4/forza-4-studio-tour-1/index.html
(Wednesday 8 October 2014 | 13:27) - I used a picture posted on this website on the outside of Turn 10 studio's.

http://living-myth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/two-souls-one-face.html
(Wednesday 8 October 2014 | 13:41) - I used a picture posted on the website of the sequel of games Ellen Page is in.

http://www.howoriginal.net/artist_pages/Marita/god_bless_america.htm
(Wednesday 8 October 2014 | 15:02) - I used a picture of New York City posted on this website.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/what-is-ofcom/
(Wednesday 8 October 2014 | 15:12) - I used information about OFCOM off this website.

http://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA.aspx
(Wednesday 8 October 2014 | 15:26) - I used information about ASA off this website.

http://www.esrb.org/index-js.jsp
(Wednesday 8 October 2014 | 15:33) - I used information about ESRB off this website

http://www.pegi.info/en/index/id/33/
(Wednesday 8 October 2014 | 15:42) - I used information about PEGI off this website.