Week 5

Abstract Our learning objectives for the week were:

• Outline the structure of the Team Charter document.

• Discuss the importance of style guides.

• Come together as a team to establish shared values, strategies and goals.

Post 1: Presentation Deck

A week away from the mock presentation, I looked at the project plan again and the presentation straw man I had created earlier.

I visualised the flow of the deck and created a table so we could gather all the content in one place.

Page	Speaker	Content
Concept	Nural
Story	Nural
Gameplay	Dan
Music	Dan
Machine Learning	Lucas
Art Style	Luke
Playable Demo/Walkthrough	Lucas
Users and Market-fit	Linda
Personas	Linda
Road-map	Nural
Our Team and background	Nural
Investment and projections	Nural
Appendix	No one

I pinged the rest of the Team in Discord to have a chat about assets and who talks through what.

I also created a template file, so we had a consistent look and feel. Finding a font that worked for our concept also.

Meeting 1: Presentation Deck

28/06/2021 I took the Team through the flow of the deck and the page I had created in Confluence. We went through the sections and assigned team members to each one.

Discussing that my aim was that the deck was fairly divided up.

We also finalised the team charter.

Action points for the meeting were that each member would put their content within the table to review and check the flow.

Full meeting notes can be found here.

Post 2: Market Analysis

I had taken on presenting the game concept. The elevator pitch, if you will.

I have a lot of experience working with start-ups creating investment decks in the past. However, I was unfamiliar with putting a game together.

I didn't know what the process was for putting a game together, the team size and the size of the investment you should ask for.

I started to ask the team about their experience and also the rest of the cohort. Still, no one seemed to have any formal industry experience before or had information on the level of detail I needed.

I started to look online for resources and reviewed a few GDC talks that went into Game pitching mistakes and advice.

(GDC, 2017)

(GDC, 2019)

With all my research so fo the key takeaways were:

• Focus on the Gameloop

• Don't focus too much on the story

• Don't overcook your numbers or overestimate how much you'll sell

I was also really depressed by the numbers people talked about, and the low number of copies independent developers were making.

I came across the Boxleitner method (Carless, 2020) and used that to estimate our sales.

I looked at several outlier games and created a market analysis table.

The full table can be found here.

I then averaged the numbers and estimated we would sell in the region of 3,000 games and we should price our game at 12.99 once fully completed.

This would give us a total revenue of 38,000 and net revenue of 12,700. Which is less than appealing.

Reference

1. Carless, S. (2020). How that game sold on Steam, using the “NB number”. [online] newsletter.gamediscover.co. Available at: https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-that-game-sold-on-steam-using [Accessed 21 Jul. 2021].

2. GDC (2017). 30 Things I Hate About Your Game Pitch. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTtr45y7P0.

3. GDC (2019). So You’re Ready to Pitch to a Publisher? You’re Not. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP-nmrMb9FQ [Accessed 17 Aug. 2021].‌

Meeting 2: Project status

30/06/2021 We had a project status meeting, and I presented the Market analysis back to the team. Resolving that, I needed to investigate the revenue model further as our game didn't look like a worthwhile investment.

Linda Fitzgerald presented dialogue boxes, and Lucas Souza gave us an update on game mechanics. I went around the table again to make sure each team member owned their sections of the deck and defined the target market for Linda based on my research.

Full meeting notes can be found here