Today I want to reflect as son as posible, my impressions after having carried out the first live presentation of our project in public. Love to play with fire!
Â
Are You Ready to Prepare High-Quality Pitching Documentation?. Whichever partner you are looking for, you will need to make the first contact, send information about the project, and clearly state what your needs are. Pitching documentation should always be adapted to the targeted partner, be concise, easy to read, and contain all necessary information. (Limpach 2020 :96).
Practice pitch week!
Finally, we got the long-awaited mail from Jamie: the pitch session will take place next Tuesday 6th and Thursday 8th July. Two 90 minute webinars to present our ideas not only to him and Giovanni but also to three well-known industry experts.
Due to our work and family commitments, we decided to take the first place on Tuesday. The offered possibility to use a pre-recorded video for the pitch was not thought as the best option. I’m convinced that we’re going  learn more about ourselves and the team performance directly from the trenches.
I spent the weekend working on the slides for the pitch deck to show this to our supervisor before the actual presentation. IÂ started working with Canvanizer, a tool that I had never heard of before from Week 4, to get a rough version.Then, after explaining my work to the rest of the group to get to know their opinions and work on each possible modification suggested, I was able to get the document done on Powerpoint, a couple of days before the deadline.
Giovanni made us a very positive feedback which, fortunately, needed just a few adjustments and adding one more slide, what we did.
The day came, and I was in charge of opening the first session; confident enough, there were a couple of unexpected things, though.
Having undertaking other pitches a couple of times with a face-to-face jury led me to see that looking at their eyes was the most straightforward way to verify if the message gets the receiver’s attention. During the online presentation, instead, I only had the slides in front of me. There was probably an option to see the experts’ windows in the software used for the conference, but I had neither the time nor the chance to enable them on my screen, so the whole pitch was like ‘flying on instruments’.
The experience was rather weird. I usually improvise quickly and correct my speech path if I visually notice that the message is not being conveyed. But this time, it was impossible for me to take this course of action. I thought the timing could have been slower to handle the slides having a little extra time. But under these conditions, I could not guess whether the people on the other side were getting bored or get the right amount of time to read the content of each slide. This situation made me feel a little bit nervous.
Generally speaking, I think that the issue was appropriately handled, concerning the transition among the team’s participants, Debbie and Will, who were taking part in the narration.
The feedback
In relation to the critique obtained by the three industry members, I have to say it was incredibly accurate and productive, once again not full of little surprises, though!
We were told that it was not expected to show a working prototype of the game on the part of the students. That’s why they did not open the presentation showing some actual gameplay of the game. We could have perfectly done since we had an early prototype ready to be shown. Anyway, we did it during the last minutes of our pitch.
Now we know that it is better to present the prototype before the slides, which we’re going to do next time.
Concerning the game references chosen by us to explain the content of our project (Don’t Starve and Cozy Groove on slide 7) turned out to be insufficient and unclear. It came as no surprise the lack of a deeper explanation about the game mechanics and the main game-loop above all. We thought it had become evident but not explicit enough. Anyway, we took notes of everything, and we have already gotten on these issues.
In terms of actual game design you have a lot there: puzzles, combat, resource management… it is very ambitious so It will be very good to have an small breakdown of how an average session will work, you know, just walk me through it: who am I controlling? Â I am controlling the main character or the whole tribe?. Make me understand, make me in vision on my head how the game will play out. If you have a working demo show that off because that wold be perfect.(Anisa Sanusi ) 0:12′
If you’re going to put some games as reference you can’t really assume that everybody knows those games. If you say ‘Don’t Starve’, what part of it are you getting inspiration from?. Cozy Grove without cozy I don’t have any idea of what that is!. You need to be more specific about your references if this is going to be an important part of your pitch. (Roman Ohlendorf) 0:14′
Is an interesting concept, I don’t think we have a lot of prehistoric theme games out there. (Anisa Sanusi) 0:15′
Cool presentation, cool game, I really liked you show the game straight away, I think this is the only presentation were all we see the actual sort of gameplay (Roman Ohlendorf) 1:04′ July 8th
As suggested by the experts during both sessions, an excellent way to learn a lot from our mistakes and achievements is throughout the other teams’ presentations which, at the same time, had their ups and downs as well.
Of all the projects presented during both sessions, there were two of them that got my attention because of both the topic and content; They were Asimov (from 8th July) and Manuki Motu (from 6th July).
My personal contribution to the project (5): Pitch deck
This is the complete pitch deck we presented on the 6th July 2021.
Finally after today’s performance, I certainly felt that our team starts showing its potential! Time to actualize this chart:
Development diamond and the dangers of over scoping our project
As life continues after the pitching, I’d like to end this entry with some updates concerning the evolution of the prototype. I can’t think of anything better at this point than using the development diamond as a roadmap of our progress.
When we measure the progress of a project, we look at tasks and bugs. These are assigned to team members, and the rate of resolution versus the rate of creation gives us a sense of a project’s progress. (Hewson 2021).
When creating a video game, it is pretty likely that they will go through the stages that we can see in the example below on the left. This is an ideal scenario that at some point during the process will fall into the right side of the chart, specially with inexperienced teams or very ambitious projects. To better understand this I need to explain a few concepts based on Rob Hewson article published on Issue 45 of Wireframe magazine.
Inflation (Pre-Alpha): the period of inflation is a cauldron of problem creation. Here is where the game’s content (characters, levels, mechanics, narrative) Here is where the game’s content (characters, levels, mechanics, narrative) has to be resolved.
Alpha:Â the structure of your game materialises and you should begin to see that you are now solving problems faster than you are creating them
Contraction (Post-Alpha): you gradually collapse the project towards completion. The earlier you reach this phase, the more quality you can apply. The ideal development diamond gives you an extended Contraction phase in which to polish your game to ensure the game’s quality.
Release:Â you have created and solved all the problems you needed to reach a releasable state.
As we are working just on an early prototype not all this concepts applies, though our development cycle is very similar. At this point we are in the middle of the Inflation pre alpha phase with Keep It Burning, facing what the author calls ‘the Universe of problems’, on the left side of the figure above. ‘After the big bang at the beginning of the project, it will and must inflate rapidly, but more importantly, it must at some point begin to contract back towards a big crunch if you want to release your game. This, of course, is the tricky bit. Most of the time the problems arise from content taking longer than expected to create, or being scrapped and redone, because it’s not up to scratch, or because your team comes up with new, better ideas in the process’. (Hewson 2021)
Needless to say, we are going through the funniest part of the road, though I can see a couple of obstacles not too far away: the implementation of clear goals (very probably in the form of mini quests) and, most scarier, this idea of using ‘cavemojis’ (a mix of emojis in the form of cave paintings) to communicate the quest to the player. It sounds like a nice idea and very interesting to develop, but it can be very time consuming to achieve and a potential source of distraction at this point, something that could easily put us on the other side of the example (right) were if we over scope the project or allow feature-creep to take hold we can end up with an extreme period of inflation that we’re not going to enjoy.
What we need now is to finish a solid working prototype to start play testing it.
The GDC 2021
What a surprise to find again my mentor Jason della Rocca (see my previous entry about him) as one of the speakers at the Game Developers Conference 2021 talking about how to pitch games to publishers.
List of figures
Fig 1. Asimov project from Simulacrum Games Team and Manuki Moto from CD RAM.
Fig 2. Ancient cave paintings from Hidalgo’s Cave and game logo for Keep it Burning created by the author.
Fig 3. Logo for the Wild Branch Team created by the author.
Fig 4. Sliders from the final pitch deck for Keep it Burning. Images by the author.
Fig 5. Team Performance Curve for The Wild Branch on Week 4 based upon Katzenback and Smith scheme.
Fig 6. The Development Diamond scheme by Rob Hewson.
Fig 7. Keep It Burning development Trello board. Image capture by the author.
Fig 8. Jason Della Rocca’s talk ‘How to Pitch your Game‘ at GDC 2021. (c) Game Developers Conference 2021.
References
Falmouth University, 2021. ‘Week 4 Introduction’ [online]. Available at: <Co-Creative Design & Development Practice GDD730 20/21 Part-Time Study Block S3> [Accessed 18 June 2021].
Garcia Lopez, L , Diez-Bedmar, M. 2013. ‘From being a trainee to being a trainer: helping peers improve their public speaking skills‘. RevPsicodidact, 18(2), pp.331-342
Hewson, R. 2021. ‘Big Bang: Dealing With A Universe Of Game Dev Problems’ .Wireframe magazine issue 45. Raspberry Pi Publishing.
Limpach, O. 2020. ‘The Publishing Challenge for Independent Video Game Developers – A Practical Guide‘. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
