During these last days I was busy with a bunch of pitches… Man, it sucks! I know that as a game designer we have to be able to design the game from the basic concept to the high implementation and we should love to work on each phase of the project. Actually I like to design the basic concept, however it is more exciting to work on the high implementation, when you face the real challenges and should follow up the team in order to achieve the project’s goals.
In the perfect world the game designer wakes up early, takes a shower, eats something healthy and goes to his work singing “I feel good”. Once the game designer is in the office, he or she will receive a detailed briefing requiring a game pitch. Usually it is a short presentation document describing the overall idea of the game. The designer makes a research and discusses some ideas with another designers or colleagues… After a couple of days, a very creative and original game will be described in a great pitch to the publisher. Furthermore, the project will enter in the pre-production phase, the publisher will pay for the project, and the producer will gather the people to work on that amazing project during the next months.
Unfortunately, in the real life it is a little bit different! First of all, don’t think that you will always receive detailed briefings, sometimes they are so poor that it is hard to figure out what the client is asking for! In some cases it is difficult to understand if they want a point and click adventure or a social simulation, for instance!!! Trust me, sometimes it happens. Someday I will start a blog to post all those briefings: stupidbriefings dot com… =P
On the other hand, the opposite situation also happens!!! Some Request for Proposals (RFP) will contain loads of details about the game the company wants, that you will have trouble to write a good pitch, because the RFP practically contains the main idea defined at al. Sincerely I’m not sure which one is the worst!
However, the good part of all this is that we are always learning! We can pass a week studying about dog’s behavior to design a pitch and in the next week we will have to research about surf. At least we are studying interesting subjects… Well… Ok…Some of them aren’t that interesting, but it is also cool to learn new things.
Well, but as I was saying, the real life can be very cruel! A game designer normally writes tons of pitches, but most of them will never pass this phase. After that, it is also possible to have a game canceled during the pre-production phase or even during the production phase!!! Oh yeah, sad but true!
