http://www.hellblade.com/unseen-ninja-theory-razer/

Once game-making reaches a certain scale, the process of game-making becomes front-loaded with the process of convincing someone to pay for the development of your game.

If you play games but don’t make them, you may find this enlightening. I know that when I was younger, and particularly before I chose to make commercial games as my career, I took games for granted. As in, “I want to play a game, so I’ll go buy a game.” It never occurred to me how much decision-making went into the process. And now that I do this for a living, I feel a sense of kinship when I see someone else’s efforts in the process. Post-mortems and development conferences are fascinating, for example.

So here’s a look at the sort of thing I do all day when I’m not engaged in the nuts and bolts of actually making the game: I’m trying to convince someone who has the means — financial, labor, distribution — to make an idea become more than an idea, and begin its metamorphosis from idea to playable experience. (This isn’t a proposal I worked on, but it’s a good template for or inside view of the process.)

This sort of thing is usually hidden behind NDAs and other proprietary screens, but Ninja Theory has published some of its preproduction documentation that shows just how substantial and detailed pitching and pre-production can be.