Game Production Stages

tim-cain game-development production pipeline prototyping outer-worlds

Abstract

Problem: What are the distinct stages a game goes through from first buildable artifact to post-launch, and what does each stage actually contain?

Approach: Tim Cain walks through the nine production stages he's used across his career, explaining the purpose of each with concrete examples from The Outer Worlds.

Findings: Game production follows a roughly linear sequence: test rooms → prototype → beautiful corner → vertical slice → horizontal slice → alpha → beta → ship → patch → DLC. Each stage serves a specific validation purpose — from isolated feature testing to full content completion.

Key insight: The horizontal slice (all areas playable but incomplete) is just as critical as the vertical slice (one area fully complete), because it reveals connectivity problems, play-time estimates, and ordering issues in nonlinear games — and it eventually becomes the game as content fills in.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IADSh_P05As

1. Test Rooms

The first things built with the engine are test rooms — isolated levels designed to test individual features without interference from other systems. Tim describes four types:

  • Combat test rooms — Single creatures, groups, bosses, breath-weapon enemies. Include weapon chests and a button to disable AI so you can test attacks without being hit back.
  • Stealth test rooms — Locks of varying difficulty, hackable computers, traps to disarm, guards to sneak past, vents and crouch holes.
  • Dialogue test rooms — Test proximity triggers, NPC cameras, multi-NPC conversations, companion dialogue, and interruption events (e.g., combat breaking out mid-conversation).
  • Exploration test rooms — Jumping heights, crouch clearances, movement bounds. These give level designers concrete reference values for geometry constraints.

These rooms exist so anyone on the team can verify how a feature works and what its limits are.

2. Prototype

The prototype tests all features together in a playable form. It's often gray-boxed — no final art, just functional geometry. The goal is to validate pacing: combat, traps, guards, and dialogue flow in sequence to answer "what will the game feel like to play?" It won't look like the final product, but it should play like it.

3. Beautiful Corner

Usually made around the same time as or shortly after the prototype, a beautiful corner is a small area rendered to final shipping quality. Its purposes:

  • Show the team and publisher what the finished game will look like
  • Verify that artists can actually produce in-game art matching the concept art
  • It's typically not playable (or only walk-around playable)

The name comes from the fact that if you turn 180°, you'll see the art stops — it's only "beautiful" in one corner. The Outer Worlds' beautiful corner was a water treatment plant where you could walk among equipment, look out windows at a ship flying by, and see an NPC standing nearby.

4. Vertical Slice

Built roughly halfway to two-thirds through development, a vertical slice takes one area to full completion — nearly every feature, nearly all final art, full VO. It answers: "this is exactly what the game will be."

The Outer Worlds' vertical slice was Roseway, which included multiple instances, a town, the ship, and full companion VO. It deliberately excluded crafting (the crafting station was on the ship, which was off-limits), fast travel, and companion-switching because those features weren't ready yet — but everything else was finished.

They had Roseway playable over a year before shipping. By that point, everyone — publisher and development team — was on the same page about what the game would be.

5. Horizontal Slice

Tim notes he may have coined this term. It's the orthogonal complement to the vertical slice: all areas are playable, but none are complete. Some may be gray-boxed, some missing content. The horizontal slice serves three critical purposes:

5.1. Connectivity

How do all the levels connect? You might discover a level is physically disconnected and needs a landing pad. Or that reaching a certain map requires a quest — which then must be universally accessible, not locked behind a niche side quest.

5.2. Play Time

With all levels roughly playable, you can estimate total game length. If the horizontal slice takes 20 hours, the final game will be at least that long since more content is still coming.

5.3. Ordering Issues (Nonlinear Games)

What happens if the player visits levels out of order? Are tough areas properly telegraphed? Do NPCs respond correctly if the player has already been somewhere "early"? Tim emphasizes they tried never to assume the player had or hadn't done something before any NPC conversation.

The horizontal slice eventually becomes the game as content fills in — at some point you stop calling it a slice.

6. Alpha

All areas are in, all playable, all content is in — but the game is unbalanced, buggy, and may have small gaps. Example: all crafting stations are placed correctly, but not every recipe is finished; or a mineable ore exists in at least one location but not all planned locations yet. Alpha means you can test everything a player could potentially do.

7. Beta

All content is final — no more additions of any kind (side content, achievements, nothing). Beta is exclusively for:

  • Bug fixing
  • Final balancing (combat formulas, vendor prices)
  • Optimization (both programming and art — oversized textures, excessive polygon counts)

Tim references the dangers of premature optimization as the reason this work belongs in beta, not earlier.

8. Ship, Patch, DLC

Ship is self-explanatory. Then come patches — fixing bugs, balancing, adding small missing content like absent VO lines. Finally, DLC ranges from cosmetic packs (armor, hats, crafting recipes) to full content expansions with new levels, storylines, raised level caps, and new skills/perks.

Tim notes the line between a large DLC and a sequel (or between a sequel and an "expensive DLC") can get blurry.

9. The Nine Stages (Summary)

  1. Test Rooms
  2. Prototype
  3. Beautiful Corner
  4. Vertical Slice
  5. Horizontal Slice
  6. Alpha
  7. Beta
  8. Ship
  9. Patch / DLC

10. References