22/02/2018 (Thursday) “2 Pitches, 1 Greenlit”-

We are an impromptu group called Game Cave Productions, consisting of 5 game design students at SAE Qantm Perth. For this 13 week trimester, we will be learning to create games which have a Commercial or Serious purpose. For those who are new to game development, consider reading our blogs as a source for learning, as we will try to be as transparent as while we document the stages of our creation of the game.

Our first milestone towards creating a game involved pitching our game(s) to a client. Considering that we were pitching to our lecturer's, we were assigned to pitch two games. Something to be considered when pitching, is the amount of time that will be available to create the game. For us, we have about 9 weeks to create the game which will be greenlit, so within a time limit of 9 weeks, our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) has to appear to be achievable i.e don't try to pitch a product that sounds amazing but can't actually create based on the resources available to you.

“Today we had to pitch two games to our clients (our lecturers), they were a commercial tower defence game with a military theme which focused on providing a return profit to our clients. Its main selling point was a unique card system which our group had came up with where players could use cards to boost their towers in various ways, use abilities and unlock tower upgrade paths but are restricted by the type of cards they hold.

Our second pitch was a serious game which we had intended to use to educate teenagers to older gamers about STI’s (sexually transmitted infection) by using a comedic social style game where players must use their wits and powers of deductions to succeed, each player may have a different “Job” with different abilities and goals.

Unfortunately only our first pitched game was greenlit (Tower defence) as our second game (as we soon found out) actually contradicted itself in its goal, while the game was suppose to raise STI awareness, the concept on paper would encourage the wrong behavior by giving the players with STI the end goal of infecting everyone without getting caught teaching them that they should not disclose their infection and instead spread it as far and wide as they possibly can.

We could explore the STI awareness game later on but we would have to refine our design. Maybe we could of focused on showing how easy STI could spread around a group of people.

The major thing would be finding a way to also show the players that people with STI are still just people and people that have them need not be treated with content but as people and I think that is where we didn’t nail it in our pitch but someday we could refine the design.

The next step for us is to start planning the design of our military themed tower defence game through our Game Design Document and our art bible. The main focus we need to nail is how our card system will work and the design of our cards the look and the game feel of our cards to what the theme is. We also need to focus how the monetization will work in the game and if the player will use our monetization loop.”

• Game Cave Productions