The Game Development Cycle
The six phases in the average game development cycle are illustrated below: 
The initial phase of a project is ‘Pre Production’ where the main game concepts and features are brainstormed, designed, prototyped and signed off on. The end goal of this phase is to prove (usually via a demo) the core game play experience and produce a feature brief, technical designs and a development schedule. The project team is usually lightly staffed until ‘Production’ begins. Next comes the main development phase ‘Production’, this is usually the longest phase in a project and is where the games features and content are created and put together. The ‘Production’ phase is usually broken into several parts separated by milestones with pre-set deliverables according to the development schedule.
After production comes the main bug fixing portions of the cycle, although ideally bug fixing should be a continuous activity during the whole cycle. ‘Alpha’ is usually defined as the phase when all game features have been implemented but the game still contains major bugs like crash bugs and the game play still needs tweaking. Next is ‘Beta’ usually defined as features complete with no major or crash bugs, ‘Beta’ is usually restricted to minor tweaking of the game.
Post ‘Beta’ all that is left to do is ship the product, traditionally this meant sending a disc (usually gold coloured CD-R) of the title to the publisher for duplication for retail. This is where the term ‘going Gold’ comes from. During the ‘Gold’ phase of development any changes are forbidden except bug fixes requested by the publisher.
The final phase of a project is post production, during this phase the whole development team is not usually present as people take holidays or are assigned to other projects. The main focus during ‘Post Production’ is that of clean up and refactoring of the code base, pipelines and game systems. This includes analysing the development cycle, usually in the form of ‘Post-mortem’ style reviews and brainstorm sessions with the focus to improve future development efforts based on recent experience.
