(4) POST RELEASE PARTS

WHAT IS A GAME MADE OF? >

POST-RELEASE PARTS

Releasing a successful game to retail will be one of the most difficult things you accomplish in your professional career. After all of the cleverness it will take to get your project funded, staffed, and real; after all of the dedication to the craft during production; and after all of the blood, sweat, and tears it will take to drive a game through the final candidate cycle, you will find the day after you signed off on the gold master one of the most pure days in your career with no task that must be done now. Instead, you and the rest of the team will most likely disappear and rediscover what your family looks like and decide to talk with them—and sleep. After this much-needed rest is completed, is it time to dream up a new game? No, it is time for post-release.

Post-release involves patches, updates, answering questions on the forums, helping customer service field questions on the phone support lines, and combating cheating. For massively multiplayer games, these issues are much more serious as you are billing for a monthly service instead of a one-time purchase of a product. In fact massively multiplayer games have whole development teams called the “live teams” to maintain the software, add new content, act as gamemasters, and in general keep the product fresh
and alive in the hands of gamers.

Having a bunch of fans is a very good thing; that is the whole reason for your work. However, a bunch of fans require a substantial amount of interaction and communication. At Taldren about six of the employees have taken the initiative to read our forums on a regular basis to field questions and moderate the forums.

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CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

1. Write about Design parts of games.

2. Write about Coding part of games.

3. Write about Art part of games.

4. Write about Audio part of games.

5. What types of sounds could be there in a game?

6. Write about Quality-Assurance part of game.

7. Write about Testing for game.

8. Write about Business parts of game.

9. Write about Licencing, Promotion, Manuals, Hardware of game.

10. What are Post Release Functions in game development?