Step 1. Come up with an idea and write it down on a storyboard, a visual rough draft with pictures. The storyboard lays out each scene of the game in detail, including the game’s reactions to the characters’ actions. The storyboard will also show background scenes, enemies, objects in the scene, sounds, and points earned.

Step 2. Animate the action, background, objects, ect. This is slow work because animators have to draw things really really fine, right down to the pixel, which is the smallest dot on your TV screen. They speed it up with computers to help in the drawing.

Step 3. Compose sounds for the game, including theme music and sound effects.

Step 4. Program the software to make the game do what you want it to do when the game controller buttons are pressed. This brings together the game design, sound and action developed above. This is the hardest part of developing the game because the software has to make the right sounds, draw the right pictures, keep track of the scoring and action, know what should happen next depending on what the characters do, and so on.

Step 5. Test the game and debug it. Steps 4 and 5 happen at the same time so that you test your programming as you go along.

Step 6. Change the games to include new ideas or to get rid of bugs that otherwise couldn’t be fixed. Then re-test.

Step 7. Make the game cartridge. Hardware engineers electronically write (burn) the game programming onto ROM (read-only-memory) computer chips. Then the ROM chips and other electronic parts are then wired onto circuit boards. Then they put the circuit boards together into a plastic case. These cases are the game cartridges.

Video games are developed by design or development teams. It takes many people to develop one single game. It also takes a lot of time. A team of twenty-eight designers developed Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country.

A team usually includes story writers, graphic designers, sound designers, software programmers, debuggers and testers.

Story writers are the people who design the stories for the games. Like in Nintendo's Mario 64, the story is that Mario is trying to rescue the princess and he must go though all these worlds and collect power stars in order to face Bowser, the villain, who is imprisoning the princess. Story writers have to decide on the characters, the adventures, the rules, the challenges and rewards of the game.

Graphic designers create the pictures for the game. They design everything that you see on the screen. They decide what the landscape, characters, objects, and colors will look like.

Sound designers create every noise that comes out of the speakers from the game. This includes music, sound effects and voices.

Software programmers write the computer programs, or software, that make the game work. Computer animation is how they design the moving parts of the game using a computer. They use special computer programming languages to tell the computer what to do. This picture of Sonic is what Sega's programmers might program into their Sonic games:

Sometimes software programmers make mistakes, which are found by testers who test and play the game to find glitches. Fixing the mistakes is called debugging . Debugging is done by- you guessed it- debuggers. Debugging is a very important process. It may take weeks or months to debug a game, although a game is rarely completely free of bugs.