Before the team decided on Flubfighter we first had a game pitch session. This is our designer Barret's thoughts and experience doing a game pitch.
My boss here at Retora said that pitching was kind of a game designer's bread and butter. It
makes sense. Pitching is the thing that allows game designers to properly sell their ideas, and recently I
have taken part of a pitch session for the internship company that I have been working for to see what
game we were going to make for this semester. The process taught me a lot about how to sell one's idea
and especially on understanding who your selling a game to.
My journey to pitching a game idea started when Retora's boss, Tyler, announced at a internship
meeting that they members of the team were going to have a chance to pitch the game that the team
was going to be making. The game could be anything we could think of, but it is a good idea to think up a
game where the team could finish a vertical slice of the game done in a signal semester. The next day I
decided to start by brainstorming up some new game ideas by myself since I wasn’t working with
anyone else on the project. I had a few game ideas that I had written down before, but after I review
them again, I decided that none of those ideas would fit with the internship team. Now this is the part of
the story that gets a little fuzzy. I can’t actually remember the exact details on how I came up with the
idea for that game I ended up pitching. I just remember that I came up with the idea for Smash Odyssey
during my brainstorming session. Smash Odyssey was an idea for an adventure game for mobile and
tablet where the player had to help a guy get home from the club while he was completely high on
hallucinogens. Out of all the ideas that I thought up, Smash Odyssey was the best that I came up with, so
I decided to go with it.
The first time I told others about my idea was at a design team meeting. Tyler decided that part
of the meeting was going to be an informal pitch session for the designers, so we all went around the
room telling each other our ideas. After I gave the other designer my brief summary on Smash Odyssey,
the biggest criticism of my idea is that it was kind of devoid of game mechanics. At the time, I had only
come up with a theme and basic story idea for my game, and I still needed to flesh out the gameplay
and mechanics. The mechanics were kind of hard for my to think up. I based my game around the
adventure game model, which normally have very little gameplay in order to focus more on puzzle
solving and story. I needed to think of a way to put a spin on the adventure game formula that fit with
my hallucinogen based idea. I spent an afternoon thinking up ideas, without come up with anything. I
was finally able to come up with something when I went to get a hot dog at hot dog stand near the
Arizona Mills Mall. I decided that the player would control the main character in the game world by
drawing hallucination on the screen that would direct the main character through the environment.
With this new idea, I decided that it was time to see what other people thought of the idea at the first
practice pitch session.
Tyler was holding practice pitch sessions for people to get feedback on their ideas, so I went to
the Saturday practice session. I gave my pitch and the group decided that I now need to flesh out the
story that I was going to tell more. At that point, I only had a basic idea of what I wanted Smash
Odyssey's story to be. Tyler told everyone to go out and work on our ideas for an hour and then meet
back up at the same place to give another pitch session. I went to research stuff on erowid.com on Tyler
recommendation to try drug story to get story ideas from. While looking I found a research paper on
drug themes used in science fiction. I read over the paper until a section of the paper on mind-
controlling drugs caught my eye. I did a few google searches on mind-controlling drugs until I found a
Vice documentary on Scopolamine. Scopolamine is a drug that can be found in Columbia that kind of
suppresses the free will of the person under the drugs effect so that other people to make them do
anything that they want them to do. This was the thing that could make my basic drug story a little more
interesting. I changed Smash Odyssey's story to be about a guy who was drugged by thieves who want
to guide him home so that they can steal all of the main character's stuff. I put this idea into a
PowerPoint presentation and went to the second practice pitch with it.
I gave my Scopolamine idea to the other designers at the second practice pitch and some of
them like the idea. The criticism that I got from Tyler is that I needed to work on characters more, and
he also directed me to a few articles to read. Tyler also told me to watch Upstream color, which is a
movie that is kind of hard to decipher. I watched it anyway and was utterly confused, but it showed my
how I could turn my Scopolamine idea into a workable story. I watched the movie in the morning of the
day before the actual pitch. After I watched the movie, I spent the rest of the day thinking up ideas for
characters, and I didn’t have much luck on this front. The only idea I was able to come up with for the
characters is to have the head thief appear to the main character as a hallucinated god. It wasn’t much
but I put it in the presentation anyway.
On the day of the pitch, Tyler decided to have one last practice pitch session before the actual
pitches. I went and gave my pitch, and the last thing that the others said that I needed was a good
gameplay example. I used the little time I had to come up with a gameplay scenario about the player
trying to get his car back from a tow lot, and with that added, I was ready to do the pitch.
I went first for the actual pitch. Tyler asked to see who wanted to go first and no one
volunteered, so why not go first. My presentation was ok. I had a problem where I stumbled over my
words a little bit too much, and I ended up unnecessarily repeating things. I focused so much of my time
on the idea that I should have spent some time making presentation notes. I probably should have
practiced giving my presentation by myself just so I don’t flub my lines as much. At the time I still didn’t
feel like I did a bad job though, and I felt told the team my idea pretty well. But then I got that feedback.
The feedback I got back for my presentation was not that good. A lot of people didn’t
understand what I was going for, or just didn’t like my idea. This probably proves that I should have
thought more about my presentation to make it more clear what my idea was. I also got a lot of
feedback saying that my idea was out of scope, which points to my idea still being a little too big for this
internship.
Even though I did win the pitch, I still learned a lot about both my team and pitching in general.
The intern team for Retora is basically like an indie game studio, so I should have gone with a game idea
that was more based off a cool mechanic rather than a story. Mechanics take less time to make than
stories. If I was smarter about this, I would have realized this earlier and come up with a different idea.
The biggest thing I learned from this pitch is how important it is to understand who you are selling your
idea to, and what types of games they would be into.
By:
Barret Gaylor-Designer
