Design VideoGame Pitch

Game Design Pitches Guide

Currently, I’ve been collating and conspiring to produce a few ‘pitches’, idea’s or concepts – depending on my state of mind – in regards to producing a couple of game related designs.

It’s all rather fragmented at the moment, maybe an idea here for a new franchise or IP, some thoughts in regards to fun and interesting game mechanics that I’d like to play or see, notes on control methods that feel intuitive or minimal for repetitive actions, drafts on the type of stories to be told, establishing the scenes adding emotional depth and fleshing out the design of characters that could live in them.

So a lot of design related ‘stuff’ and ramblings of a madman.

If you could just see the contents of one of my working folders! When I sat in front of the computer today I had a paranoia attack and promptly reverted to back up all my material thinking that my PC will decide to fry something of importance in the not to distant future.

In these early stages I tend to create folders that contain moods and styles, colour schemes and graphical musings. I then have influencing artists and character art along with art direction that somewhere down the line may prove of some use. All documentation on random thoughts and ramblings, scraps of paper with lists and thematic importance associated to words, notebooks and yet more ramblings that litter my workspace are in what I like to refer to as ‘organized chaos’

So to get these pitches up to a presentational standard I’ve been researching “What makes a pitch?”, trying to stitch together a format or some form of consistency to them so they have the right hooks to appeal to the gamer as-well as the marketing men. Iterations from pitches I produced many moons ago look and feel ‘outdated’ even though the context or idea’s remain relatively accessible.

I stumbled over these two links that are ‘pitch’ related, probably not news for the main industry crowd but yet again I’ve found them more than useful when I’ve tried to style and tailor my work accordingly.

The 1st is for the initial pitch document for ‘BioShock Pitch’ by ‘Irrational Games’, I’m sure the BioShock franchise is fairly familiar to you guys so I won’t waffle about that, interesting to read the pitch and see where or what developed from that document though.

And the 2nd link worth anyone’s time as a designer, or aspiring game designer, is to get your grubby mitts on ‘Todd Harris’ ebook ‘Gamedesigner101′. As he states,

“ins and outs of creating an IP (intellectual property). Kind of the zen of game design.”

It was an infallible read to say the least!

I loved Todd’s work on the original ‘Takk and the Power of Juju’ on the Game Cube, the game itself was surprisingly a lot of fun if marred by a few harsh design faults (lack of in-game map and quest log), still, it must had done something right because it spawned a small franchise and made someone somewhere a lot of money.

Right,

Back to the grindstone.