Stages of a Project
From a lighting point of view, the stages of a project can be summed up as such:
Pre-Production:
Some companies spend little to no time on pre-production, which is a real shame. It's during the pre-production phase that so many questions get answered, that will save an immense amount of time and manpower in the long run. If you are working on a project that seems to constantly have major elements changing, and it frequently feels like most of the team don't understand the direction of the project, there's a good chance not enough time was spent on pre-production. It includes initial concept art, documentation, and clear communication on the scope of the whole project. Decisions stated clearly at this point will save months of time in re-worked assets later.
Early Production and Layout
Sometimes referred to as "gray boxing", in the initial level layouts nobody is too concerned about the art or the lighting…it's time to get a feel for the flow of either the path of the game, or if it's an open world game, the key areas. Designers will be thinking more about player cover, paths, and the overall feel of the layout, the scale, and other primary issues. As a Lighting Artist, now is a great time to start creating temp levels where you'll experiment with any new lighting tools, and (politely) ask the programmers if they can do more cool stuff in the way of tools.
Full Production
Once full production is underway, it's all hands on deck. Designers are hopefully pretty happy with the flow of things from level to level, Environment Artists are creating new assets and laying out the levels with initial models and terrain, the Audio team is starting to work on audio cues, voices, soundtrack, etc. and the FX team are starting to set up initial effects. The Lighting Artists are now completing a first pass for lighting for all levels and cinematics.
Wrapping it Up
As the end of the project approaches, hopefully there will be an art lock, meaning FX, Lighting, and Audio have time to do final placement and polish without having to worry about the levels changing anymore. At this point, the Environment Artists should only be working on minor bug fixes, collision, and material tweaks. I've found that it works best at companies that are always working on more than one game, as the environment team can now be moved on to the early stages of the next project, and stop moving things around and making major changes to this one. (I'm looking at you, Environment Artists!)
So the game project is coming to a close, and everything went so well!
Or not.
Which brings us to:
