Howdo,

I really enjoyed attending the GITG 2-day workshop. It was well run, well organised, correctly thought out and they even provided chocolate. Just fewer than 20 people attended from a variety of backgrounds, some gaming some not. It was really refreshing to see the ideas of the teams from outside the typical gaming industry. Their original thinking, drive and enthusiasm took me back 20 years to a time before publisher rejections, too many night shifts and missed milestones )

The structure of the workshop worked well, with the first exercise being to develop a concept for an already released game and then pitching it as a PSN title. The group was divided into 3 groups and then given time to formulate their idea for selling this game. This exercise showed just how much work was needed to take a game’s pitch presentation to the next level. The key findings from this exercise were.

· Understand the market

· Understand the people that will buy your game

· Explain what are you pitching for

The next session was given by SCEE and focused on the ‘X’ process. Although I’d seen this presentation on several occasions it still strikes me how effective, yet simple, this approach is. It was great to get a refresher course on it. The two practical breakout sessions covered which games had the best X statement and also which X statements fulfilled the slogan v function balance.

The third and final session of the day saw a presentation on ‘Audience Research.’ The presentation was a series of thoughts that kicked off a discussion on designing games for sociality.

The second day opened with a brief discussion on what people thought of the previous day – all positive. This discussion was followed by a presentation on ‘developing prototypes’ and covered topics such as user testing, digital design software and building a community for continued exposure. After a short break, there was another presentation entitled ‘Life’s a Pitch.’ This open and honest presentation showed the do’s and don’ts of presenting, my personal favourite being – death to powerpoint. Then, after lunch, it was on to the main event with all the companies pitching their game ideas to the panel. There were 9 pitch presentations and what I really liked about this was the fact that you had to pitch to everyone, not just the panel. This was really useful to see what worked and in one particular case, what didn’t.

So now on to the next stage of development……………..

Our goals for the end of March are to,

· Further develop our idea into a high-level concept overview

· Create a Ripomatic movie that shows the look& feel of the game

· Outsource the playable demo development work

· Provide full costings and a schedule for full production

Stay tuned for more updates as they happen.

Laters,

Ivan

This entry was posted by Catalyst Outsourcing, on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.