A Wild Industry Panel Appears

Tomorrow is the industry panel where we pitch our games and the powers that be (read: Bob, Roger, Mark, and Craig) decide which games go on to be the Cohort 3 thesis games. As far as we know we could have all four games get past this first gate, or as little as two.

The pitches from last week went well, kinda. The first pitch was really bland. Brianne and I both presented, and the pitch, to put it in the words of Roger, "felt like homework". And it did, that was completely fair. This was partially by design. Both Brianne and I like to make the first pitch rather rough and get a lot of feedback. I've felt in the past that making the initial pitch too polished tends to make the feedback less influential. However, the pitch was...pretty rough, and we needed a lot of work.

First issue was that our presentation didn't make sense with two people. We didn't really have any banter, it was mostly just trading slides. And it really clashed with the idea that our game was this solitary experience where you feel the music. So we ditched that idea and decided that I would present by myself. Next was the just the look and feel of the presentation. We needed to spice it up and really play to our strengths, rearranging some things and showing off the game earlier. So, I got to work on the awesome color scheme for our presentation, changing up the logo just a tad, coloring the vinyl record in the background, messed with the equalizer art, and took a couple videos. After we put some time in, the presentation ended up looking really great. Below is the final presentation, ready to be presented tomorrow (which was very similar to the presentation on Thursday, minus a couple placeholder pieces and whatnot):

Check out the presentation here.

And for very busy people, here are the two gameplay videos in the presentation, for your viewing pleasure:

So our pitch on Thursday went much better. In my own personal estimation, we went from maybe the worst presentation to probably the best presentation (although they were all really great). We focused our message and laid out our game with surgical precision. After Thursday, we're feeling really good about where we stand in the thesis game selection process. Tune back next week and find out how it went!