The Game Pitch

Hey,

My last post really focused on pitching my game idea to my class and coincidentally Game Career Guide also had an article about pitching a game idea. http://www.gamecareerguide.com/news/21322/gamecraft_teaches_students_art_of_.php

The article really hit home on the problem with the majority of the pitches including my own. We all had the mindset that words could acurately describe our games. This was completely the wrong approach to pitching a game. Instead we should have found as many visuals as possible and used these to sell our game idea for us. Visuals are very easily understood and would have communicated our idea across much more strongly. The idea of designing the box for the game while designing it is a great one for getting the team to make the game concept into something understandable.

The other difficulty in pitching our games was that we did not have any prototype to show. Over the summer during my internship my boss was preparing for the green light of the project we were working on. This is different than the initial proposal but still similar in a few ways. She had to prove that the game was actually worth continuing to produce. She prepared sales figures of past games in the franchise, had a complete rough draft of the game design document, concept art for each scene, and a short playable demo. This is way too much to have expected from us in our class but shows that having a prototype available is invaluable to showing off a project.

Next time I have to give a proposal I will focus on making my game idea more understandable and increase the amount of excitement surrounding it. Looking back I realize that although my game idea was easily understood the game was not as exciting as some of the other less understandable games.

Cyaz