Get in the game session takeaways

This last week or so has been a little slack for BritishIndie.com because we (and by we I mean *I*) have been away in Liverpool doing some pitch training. No, I’m not talking about football pitch, or musical pitch. I’m talking about “pitching your game concept” pitch. I was taking part in a “Get in the Game” event. The event was organised by Northwest Vision and Media, Pixel-Lab and Game Republic. It is really nice to see them working together and I felt like the event was definitely useful. The focus of the event is to get smaller developers (and lets face it, you dont get much smaller than us) to learn something about working with bigger partners. In this case the partner in question being Sony Liverpool.

Perfect pitch?

The first day was taken up with some presentation skills training. Which involved a bit of presentation in front of a camera, some discussion about the good and bad parts of each presentation (there were 14 companies in total, split into two groups), followed by some more time in front of the camera.

I’m reasonably happy in front of an audience, being a bit of an old fart. So I wasn’t phased by having people in front of me. I guess being a lecturer helped there too. But I did learn a couple of really useful things about my own presentations:

• Never wear light colours on TV
• I am too laid back when trying to get my points across
• Pauses are sometimes good, to give the audience time to take information in
• The beginning and end of the presentation are the things they will remember
• Don’t try and convey too much information, stick to three key points
• Practice presenting in front of a camera, replay your own presentations
• Be positive in your critique, 2 positives 1 negative is ok

I am sure that the things we discussed during the presentation training will definitely help make pitching better. Certainly I expect to be able to improve my own presentation skills leading up to the actual pitch. One thing we did discuss was the possibility of not using powerpoint at all. The main point of a pitch being to get across an idea and powerpoint being a way for people to lose sight of that and simply to geek out doing slide transitions. I think there is some merit to thinking about this some more. For my own pitch to Sony, I have some plans that might enable me to ditch using powerpoint for the presentation, or at least minimize the “powerpointyness” of the pitch. After all, they’re going to have seen 14 companies presenting 20 minute pitches in one day, I know from bitter experience how your mind melts when viewing something as intense as a pitch in such a short timespan.

On Friday we also learnt a little about the kind of things Sony look for in a pitch (we have to pitch to Sony next month) and learnt of a few expressions they use internally, which I’ll try and describe now.

The X statement

The “X” Statement

The X statement is a simple expression of the core of the idea. They talked about Motorstorm’s X statement being “Brutal off-road racing” (or a paraphrase of same). It is basically what I’ve seen called an “elevator pitch” before. The concept being the simplest thing you could say to someone to get a an idea of what the product is about.

The Rip-O-Matic

Like the X statement, this is a method of trying to convey the experience of the product. We were shown an example for Little Big Planet. The ROM doesn’t actually need to show the product, so much as the values of the product. Apparently they are going to put up some video on GITG site so hopefully you can watch this for yourselves. But the closest I’ve seen to this thing before is in the movie “What Women Want” with Mel Gibson where he starts hearing the thoughts of women. During the film they have to pitch to NIKE and he comes up with this (stolen) idea for a pitch which sells the vision of a woman running on a road, the road not being judgemental, the road always being there (yada yada). So at the end they hit the tagline and everyone loves it. This felt fairly similar to that concept. Its really about expressing in video the essense of the experience rather than trying to tell people exactly what the product is. Interesting really, I’ll be trying that out next week.

The X movie

This one was more for AAA style developers than us indies. The X movie is the type of movie that attempts to actually recreate the game, but in a short movie. A bit like the killzone2 and motorstorm trailers, although there are obvious drawbacks for when people see the movie and expect the game to be exactly the same. One thing that amuses is that the budget for some of these movies could be pretty much the same as an indie game.

The X demo

This is a demo of the final product, but trying to only show the major elements. I have also seen this called a “vertical slice”. The idea is to make a demo that faithfully recreates the user experience for a tiny fraction of the game. It probably works best for games with lots of content, because you only need to produce a small part of the content and suggest “more of the same”. My own game is using procedurally generated content techniques and is mostly AI-based, so the X demo is a little bit harder to pull off because it won’t represent the final polish of the finished product. There is a danger that if you show a demo that is really crude, people who are less well versed in game development might simply think that it IS a representation of the finished game and not like it due to the lack of polish or final content.

Just Add Water's concept art

Takeaways

The thing I take away most from the experience is that you really have to be able to define and describe your “vision” for the game. Why should people be interested in it? Can you explain it to them in a way you might an 8 year old kid etc. Being concise and understandable when tasked with describing what might eventually end up quite a complex game can be hard, but it should still be possible to distill the essense of the gameplay down into a single sentence. My own game still has a bit of thinking to be done, but I’m considering “Mess with the heads of cute box characters” as a starting point. The question is, can anyone understand from that what they will be doing in the game?

On Friday the guys from Sony gave us an exercise to do, looking at other games X statements. These were gleaned from marketing materials so were probably not that accurate as an X statement, but we tried to rank the various titles and statements along the axes of good-bad and functional/slogan. It turned out to be pretty hard to find good examples. Although there were often huge differences of opinion. Clearly the point is to get everyone to buy into the statement, whatever it may be.

We were also shown some concept art from a game by Just Add Water (another British Indie we’ll have to catch up with) who got their game on PSN.

All in all, a great few days. But it really puts a crimp on updating the site!! Hopefully normal schedules will be resumed from next week. We’re slowly tracking down a few indies we know, but I think we’ve got a long way before we can say we caught em all!

Til next time!

.Z.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.