The Development Process

There are many steps to the development of a virtual world. For smaller worlds with fewer players and different functionality, some steps can be skipped or done in tandem with other steps. To highlight every aspect of the process, however, the description in this chapter is for a large, graphical world. Luckily, designers don’t need to know every detail of this—that’s the job of the producer—but they do need to have an idea of how it breaks down. Therefore, you’ll be relieved to learn that only an overview will be presented here, rather than a how-to guide. If you want to find out more (and to understand why it is that producers are paid twice as much as designers), consult Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide ¹ by Bridgette Patrovsky and Jessica Mulligan (for virtual worlds) or Game Architecture and Design ² by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris (for games in general).

The development of online games has four distinct phases:

• Pre-production

• Production

• Roll out

• Operation

Let’s look at these in turn.