As the date for our pitch gets closer and closer the work gets more hectic! After opting to use Unity instead of Phyre Engine we have had no more technical issues however and now it is just a case of time and preference.

We also decided that regardless of the fact that this only a pitch (something we have to keep reminding ourselves off) we want to make it look as good as we can (the bain of artists!) . This has thrown up lots of new questions, such a s shall we bake lighting or use real time lighting? Should we use Normal Maps? How far can we go with these textures before they become a strain on the engine? All to be considered and tested but fortunatley these are all just aesthetic issues and not project halting!

Wer also decied that we wanted to make a fully functioning prototype for our pitch. Something we wnated to do to prove to ourselves that we can make a good efficiently and produce it to the standard that we envisaged when the game was concieved. We’re pleased to say that despite the whole process being quite alien to us we have had some great help and we are now a lot moe confident we can do this than we where when we started.

As it stands we are now in theprogramming phase, fingers crossed this goes well!

Thanks, Milky Tea

Pitch day  - and despite setting out with acres of time, cars, vans and lorries decide they want to make the journey to Liverpool with us – slowly!! and a 90minute journey takes 180minutes and we miss our slot.

first rule of pitch sales techniques…don’t be late.  Oooops. F***

Any nerves we felt on route, were smoked and bitten away, but on arriving at Sony Liverpool, we become serene, and giggly.  It’s a calming building and, though we have genuine doubts as to whether what we want to pitch is of any interest AT ALL to Sony and the guys at Pixel Lab, we’re ready to go for it.  We’ve some nifty slides and a ripomatic we’re proud of and even I’ve grown a set of balls!

So, yes, we’ve pitched a banana in an apple flavoured world – but what a buzz! I love pitching (I know, I am getting help for this one)

As we crack on with the pitch, I realise that our ethos, our desire to push boundaries and try something slightly left of field is, though probably not what Sony want, it is something that we will persue beyond this pitch and this process has helped define a future vision for Savvy that, if Sony don’t buy it, we will continue down this road.  Which, again, we have GITG and Northwest Vision and Media to thank for – an opportunity to think big and plan bold.

The 6 (or was it 300 panel members (felt like a lot around that table)) gave us a really exciting, thorough, uplifting and heated gentle grilling which is exactly what we needed.  And the two or 3 unanswerable questions  - that were asked (you know the kind, small matters like business models, making it pay…..) took us to the heart of the holes in our pitch idea…. holes we knew were big ones, and that we weren’t sure we could fill.

By the end of the session we knew that we were knocking on the right doors in terms of the sorts of products we wanted to develop, in terms of what shape we thought the future might become and we knew that Sony would hear our pleas again but now wasn’t the right time.  Marcus had made a convincing technological knowledge and plan, Richard proved the possibilities with some wider research and a good deal of gaming knowledge and I, well, I got all over excited and empassioned… it’s a flaw.

Rather ill advisedly, I found I could no longer contain my over theatrical nature and left thanking them for listening and saying that although it was a wild card – wasn’t development about pushing boundaries? and the chance to try something different?  - and if funding like GITG wasn’t the chance to aim high and wide what was?  And anyway what did they have to lose?

I was thankfully rescued by the team from climbing my soap box (which in the absence of one may well have become the conference table…. and we left, knowing we’d blown it but were strangely ok with that; in the time we couldn’t have done more.

Half way down the M62 (Where were all the cars from earlier!!!) Marcus had a Eureka moment and we found a plug for a big hole and realised what we were missing… c’est la vie.

So what happened?

When, late Friday evening, 2 days later, I got a call to say that no one was more surprised than the panel of judges to be giving us one of the 5x 10k to take our ideas further……. we were for a very brief moment Speechless!

Day 3 of the GITG sessions  @ FACT and we learn from different companies the tricks of the trade, the intricacies of the gaming world and the pleasures and pitfalls, blitz games and media molecule take us through some of their work… and I survey my Savvy team and realise I am the only member without a Playstation (shameful truth laid bare!) –  in this building probably, so tonight it is to be Christmas and Little Big Planet is moving in.  My 7 year old leaps for joy and promptly teaches an old hand new tricks.  And I am excited at the possibilities beyond the titles that are held within this Pandoras box.

The hi-light “defining the X statement” was a really useful pitch – a gaming shaped log line and elevator pitch exercise that has proved absolutely vital in defining our product.  more useful stuff to take away

All the companies  eagerly await the session from Staff at Playstation and are disappointed to find that Enda’s summing up probably gives us more direction and insider information, but we leave with a burning desire to get in the game when 14 (or is it more?) companies become the winning 5

Where to start?! We never assumed making a game would be easy, in fact we always thought it would be very difficult, but we never really saw the problems we encountered coming (exporting, temperamental software, late nights etc etc, it hurts thinking about it). However, despite our tenatative start we are now at full steam and very excited about the game we hope to produce thanks to our dedicated and imaginative in-house team and a very helpful programmer!

We have spent a lot of time on the design of the prototype, with the main emphasis on the gameplay and how to make it fun! We decided from day one that if we ourselves wouldnt want to play the game, then why bother? We always find that enjoyment in our work poduces the best results and to deliver the strongest game we could this was essential!

One area we found required most development was the control system. Despite our concept being quite straight forward the control shave always been a sticking point. They are quite complex, but we recognised that they also need to be fluid and easy to pick up. After several drafts and advice from some external sources we feel we have finally nailed it, until the next tests that is!

When we started this project our aim was to produce the game using Phre Engine, something that at first seemed a great idea but we had many many issues, mainly with exporting and once we got past one hurdle another appeared in its place. Because of this and because of our time constraints we decided to make the switch to Unity and speaking as one of the artists I could not have been happier, much easier:).

As I said, the project is now going from strength to strength and we as a team are really enjoying ourselves. Fingers crossed we can deliver the prototype we hope too.

Chris, Milky Tea

Bringing together Savvy’s team of technologists programmers and coders with directors, producers and development producers – required a huge amount of terminology unravelling and working practice changes, so when we did the Agile training it was interesting that half the team considered themselves to be working this way anyway and the other half found a strategic look at project working practice a real gem…. Great. Still feel like the Kola Cube in a packet of Smarties, but interesting none the less

So, those GITG decision makers seemed to think that we might just be an interesting fit for the project. From the off, we have been labelled “The Wild Card” – not because of our crazy reputation for partying, but because the rest of the party belong to a different universe!!!
1st day of the 3 day training event at FACT in Liverpool and I walk straight into a conversation about RENDER FARMING !!!!! What the???? – So the twilight zone is alive and well in Liverpool and the language is alien. After 3 days of terminology like gaming mechanics and metagaming and a whole pile of acronym’s like npc’s and mmorpg, I am starting to believe that the gap is one of differing terminology rather than a whole new industry and there’s a little bit of me starts to believe that the holy grail of finding the missing link between passive broadcast entertainment and interactive gaming could be there for the taking if only we can unravel the Enigma code…. An Enigmatic and compelling challenge… I start to thank Enda and David and the team for believing that we might fit, somewhere in the picture. After all what is development about if not pushing the boundaries.

So it’s late summer 2009 and there’s an advert on the NWVM site which Savvy decide to pitch to develop a Sony Playstation project… And yet we are a company that developed from broadcast narrative through creation of a digital toolkit towards cross platform narratives – online on mobile, radio, TV. So why does gaming appeal? Well, Savvy’s main aim is to put its audiences at the heart of the drama – with interactive experiences that engage and entertain… and, well, the gaming industry has been getting this right for rather a long time. They also have an audience who expect and are willing to pay for content and who are creating key online communities, and as 6% of the bbc iplayer traffic comes through the PS3, the boundaries are definitely blurring and we like blurry. What’s not to like? I think there’s a lot to compliment our current work and interactive dramas and narrative games are closer than the terminology would seem to suggest. So we applied…..

Five teams have now been selected to receive £10K in development money from Northwest Vision and Media and Screen Yorkshire. These companies will spend the next few months pulling out all of the stops to get their game concept to the next level, ready to pitch again to Sony in March 2010…

Of 12 companies that got through to the intial pitching stage, 4 North West companies and one company from Leeds were selected. These are (in no particular order) Milky Tea (Liverpool); Savvy Productions (Manchester); Connect2Media (Manchester) Pixinworks (Liverpool) and Grantmidwinter (Leeds).

Sony, Northwest Vision and Media, Pixel-Lab and Screen Yorkshire were all blown away by the quality of these ideas, and can’t wait to see them grow.

All companies involved will be encouraged to blog on the site, so watch this space!

Northwest Vision and Media will be holding a session on narrative in videogames on the 28th of October in Manchester. Here are the details:

As we move into true episodic games and digital distribution this session will explore the importance of narrative in videogames. Matt Costello, whose best-selling and award-winning work across all media has meshed game play, technology and story, will lead an engaging and thought provoking discussion around how and why narrative can be used to sell games in a digital age. For more information about the event please click here: http://www.visionandmedia.co.uk/page/the-importance-of-narrative-in-games

Following this Visionary Session Northwest Vision and Media are also going to be hosting a workshop on structuring scriptwriting for videogames, run by scriptwriting agency International Hobo. For more information about this course, which will take place on 12th November, please contact Amalie Roberts (amalier [at] visionandmedia [dot] co [dot] uk).