If you are a founder, publisher, or product owner about to hire a game development agency for the first time, you probably have questions. How does the process actually work? What should you expect at each stage? How do you know whether an agency is the right fit?
These are fair questions. Most people commissioning game development have deep expertise in their own domain, whether that is education, entertainment, or publishing, but have never navigated an external game dev engagement before. The process can feel opaque if nobody walks you through it.
This guide covers what a typical engagement looks like from first contact through to launch and beyond. I have tried to be honest about what good looks like and where things commonly go wrong.
If you have not written your brief yet, start with our guide to writing a game development brief. And if you are still at the stage of figuring out whether outsourcing is right for you, our post on questions to ask before starting is a useful starting point.
Discovery and Scoping
The discovery phase is where a good agency earns its keep. Before anyone writes a line of code, both sides need a shared understanding of what is being built, who it is for, and what success looks like.
What a good discovery phase includes
A structured discovery phase typically covers:
- Understanding your goals. Not just "build a game" but the commercial or educational objectives behind it. Are you targeting a specific audience? Is there a revenue model? Are there platform constraints?
- Technical feasibility. Can the thing you want actually be built within your budget and timeline? A good agency will tell you early if something needs to be descoped or rethought.
- Reference gathering. Looking at comparable products, identifying the features and mechanics that matter most, and establishing a shared visual and design language.
- Risk identification. What are the unknowns? Where might scope creep happen? What third-party dependencies exist?
At Ocean View Games, we use this phase to produce a detailed brief that both sides sign off on. If you already have a brief, our game development brief builder can help you structure it in a way that makes scoping faster and more accurate.
Red flags at this stage
Be cautious if an agency skips discovery entirely and jumps straight to quoting. Without a proper scoping phase, estimates are guesswork. A quote without understanding is just a number.
Other warning signs include an agency that does not ask about your target audience, does not raise technical risks, or agrees to everything without pushback. A good partner challenges your assumptions constructively. That is what you are paying for.
Discovery typically takes one to three weeks depending on project complexity. It might feel like a slow start, but it consistently saves time and money further down the line. In our experience, a thorough discovery phase can prevent 20 to 30 percent of the budget overruns that plague projects where teams dive straight into production.
Proposal and Agreement
Once discovery is complete, the agency should present a formal proposal. This is the document you will refer back to throughout the project, so it needs to be clear and comprehensive.
What a proposal should include
At minimum, a good proposal covers:
- Scope of work. A detailed breakdown of features, screens, and deliverables. Vague descriptions like "a mobile game" are not sufficient. You need specifics.
- Milestone schedule. The project broken into phases with dates and deliverables for each. This gives both sides checkpoints to assess progress.
- Budget and payment terms. Whether fixed price or time-and-materials, the commercial model should be transparent.
- IP ownership. Who owns the code, art assets, and game design when the project is complete? This must be explicitly stated. In most client-agency arrangements, IP transfers to the client on payment, but never assume this.
- Change request process. How will scope changes be handled? What is the approval process and how does it affect budget and timeline?
Fixed price vs time-and-materials
Fixed price works well when the scope is clearly defined and unlikely to change. You know what you are paying upfront, and the agency carries the risk of overruns. The trade-off is less flexibility. Changes mid-project require formal change requests that adjust the budget.
Time-and-materials suits projects where requirements are expected to evolve. You pay for actual hours worked, usually against a capped budget with regular reporting. This gives you more flexibility to iterate but requires trust and strong project management on both sides.
Many engagements use a hybrid approach: fixed price for well-defined phases and time-and-materials for exploratory work like prototyping or R&D.
Production
This is where the game gets built. Production is typically the longest phase and the one where communication matters most.
Sprint cadence and milestone structure
Most agencies, including Ocean View Games, work in sprints. These are typically one or two week cycles where the team commits to a set of tasks, builds them, and delivers a working increment.
Sprints sit within a broader milestone structure. A typical mobile game project might have milestones like:
- Prototype. Core mechanic working in a rough state. Enough to validate the concept.
- Vertical slice. One complete section of the game at near-final quality. This proves the art style, UI, and core loop work together.
- Alpha. All features implemented, though not all polished. The game is playable from start to finish.
- Beta. Feature complete with polish applied. Ready for focused testing.
- Release candidate. Final version pending approval.
Each milestone should have clear acceptance criteria agreed in advance. There should be no ambiguity about what "done" means at each stage.
Communication rhythm
During production, you should expect regular, structured communication. At Ocean View Games, a typical rhythm looks like:
- Weekly builds. A playable build delivered every week or every two weeks, depending on sprint length. You should be able to pick up the game and see tangible progress.
- Sprint reviews. A short meeting at the end of each sprint to demonstrate what was built, discuss what is next, and flag any blockers.
- Milestone reviews. Longer sessions at major milestones where we review the build against the agreed criteria, gather feedback, and plan the next phase.
- Ad hoc communication. Slack, Teams, or email for day-to-day questions. A good agency is responsive without requiring you to chase them.
If your agency only shows you work at major milestone gates, problems can compound silently between reviews. Regular builds keep everyone aligned and give you the opportunity to course correct early.
Handling scope changes mid-project
Scope changes happen on virtually every project. A stakeholder has a new idea. User testing reveals an issue. A platform requirement changes. This is normal.
What matters is how changes are managed. A good agency will:
- Assess the impact on timeline and budget before committing to any change.
- Present options, such as adding the feature and extending the timeline, swapping it for something of equivalent size, or deferring it to a post-launch update.
- Document every change formally so there is a clear record of what was agreed.
The worst outcome is informal scope creep where new requests are absorbed without adjusting expectations. This leads to missed deadlines, budget overruns, and frustration on both sides.
As someone who has worked on large productions at Rockstar and Sumo Digital, I can tell you that even AAA studios struggle with scope management. The difference is not whether changes happen but whether you have a process to handle them.
QA and Polish
Quality assurance is not something you bolt on at the end. It runs parallel to production from the very first playable build.
Why QA matters throughout production
Testing during development catches bugs when they are cheapest to fix. A bug found during a sprint takes minutes to address. The same bug found during final certification can take days, because it is buried under weeks of additional work.
Effective QA during production includes:
| QA type | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Functional testing | After each sprint to verify new features work as intended. |
| Regression testing | To ensure new work has not broken existing features. |
| Device testing | Across target hardware, which is particularly important for mobile where the device landscape is enormous. |
| Performance profiling | To catch frame rate issues, memory leaks, and loading times before they become systemic. |
At Ocean View Games, our QA testing services are integrated into every project from the start, not offered as an optional extra. We test on real devices across the range of hardware our clients' players actually use.
The polish phase
The final weeks before launch focus on polish: tightening animations, refining UI transitions, tuning difficulty curves, and fixing the long tail of minor bugs that individually seem trivial but collectively define the player's experience. This phase is often underestimated in project planning. Budget for it explicitly.
Launch and Beyond
Shipping the game is not the end of the engagement. The launch process itself requires careful planning, and post-launch support is where many products find their footing.
App Store submission and soft launch
If you are launching on mobile, App Store and Google Play submission involves review processes that can take days. A good agency handles:
- Store listing preparation. Screenshots, descriptions, keywords, and metadata optimised for discoverability.
- Compliance review. Ensuring the build meets platform guidelines around privacy, age ratings, and content policies.
- Soft launch. Releasing in a limited market to gather real player data before a full global launch. This is standard practice for mobile games and catches issues that internal testing cannot.
Our app store launch services cover the full submission and optimisation process, so you are not navigating platform requirements alone.
Post-launch support
After launch, expect a period of active support. Players will find bugs your QA team did not. Analytics will reveal drop-off points in your onboarding flow. Store reviews will surface usability issues.
A good agency provides a defined post-launch support period, typically four to twelve weeks, with a clear process for triaging and fixing issues. Beyond that, many clients move to a retainer arrangement for ongoing updates, seasonal content, or feature additions.
Plan for post-launch work from the start. The first version of your game is rarely the final one.
How to Choose the Right Agency
Not every agency is the right fit for every project. Here is what to look for when evaluating potential partners.
Relevant experience
Ask to see work that is comparable to what you need. If you are building a mobile educational game, an agency whose portfolio is entirely PC shooters may not be the best match, regardless of their technical skill.
Look at their case studies in detail. Do they explain the technical challenges they solved, or just show pretty screenshots? The depth of their case studies tells you a lot about how they think about problems.
Technical alignment
If your project requires Unity expertise, work with a team that specialises in Unity. If you need multiplayer networking, check whether they have shipped multiplayer titles before. At Ocean View Games, our core team has deep Unity experience across mobile, educational, and live service projects. You can see the full range of our game development services to understand where our strengths sit.
Communication and culture
You will be working with this team for months. Pay attention to how they communicate during the sales process, because that is often the best communication you will ever get. If they are slow to respond, vague in their answers, or dismissive of your questions before the project starts, it will only get worse under production pressure.
References
Ask for references from previous clients, ideally ones with a similar project profile to yours. A good agency will be happy to connect you.
Conclusion
Working with a game development agency does not need to be a leap of faith. When the process is structured, with clear discovery, honest proposals, regular communication during production, and integrated QA, the engagement becomes predictable and productive.
The key is knowing what to expect at each stage and being willing to invest in the early phases that make everything downstream smoother. If you are considering a game development project and want to understand how we would approach it, get in touch. We are always happy to have an initial conversation with no obligation.
Adam Kaye is a senior developer at Ocean View Games, a London-based game development agency. Before joining OVG, Adam worked at Rockstar, Sumo Digital, Square Enix, BBC, and Nickelodeon.
