Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

Meeting milestones

When working on a commercial game project, especially when you have a publisher, you often times will have a schedule to keep and milestones to meet. Milestones are ways for everyone to know if the game is on track or not, because certain things need to be accomplished by them. Not making a milestone can often be a horrible thing, because your publisher usually will only pay your team if the milestone has everything in it that was agreed upon. There's no standard milestone schedule, as every company is different, but some of the most common ones are as follows:

• First-playable: This is the first version of the game that can be played. Has the main mechanic of the game in and can demonstrate how it works.
• Alpha: When all ...