How much of a game do you typically develop before making your pitch?
Your successful ones? You unsuccessful ones?
And to who? Publishers? Big, small? And Kickstarter? A different plan for that?
For small timers, does going with a middle man who swallows most profits make sense?
Anybody with experience applying to government grants like CMF? Anybody with educational grants experience?
What is the main focus of your persuasion? You trying to convince that you got an idea that will make returns first and foremost, or that you can deliver? You need to convince investor on both, but how do you start?
For our game we had a vertical slice (everyone called it a prototype but it was much more than that) that we showed off to potential investors. Our actual prototype was built in Game Maker (2D) before I joined the project, and within a few months of my joining we had a vertical slice in Unity (built-in 3D).
Everyone we showed it to liked it but because weāre a new studio it took a year before we found someone willing to invest.
I keep seeing term āvertical sliceā but not knowing exactly wht it means. So I googled.
"Vertical Slice
A vertical slice is a portion of a game which acts as a proof of concept for stakeholders before they agree to fund the rest. It is not the same thing as a prototype in that it is expected to look of final quality and play like the final game. It is like asking to see a piece of the final cake before agreeing to pay for the whole.
Requests for vertical slices are a key sign that your stakeholder (publisher, investor, whomever) has no idea what game making actually involves and is likely harboring many misconceptions about the process. The reason is that what seems like 10% of the content and therefore 10% of the effort is actually more like 70% of the effort.
Those who desire to see vertical slices make the mistake of thinking of game development as a pure production exercise, which of course it is not, and will likely misunderstand what further development will entail. Vertical slices are also simply not achievable in many kinds of game. "
Does that make sound right?
I can see how, even if you intend to only make a single level from your game, you essentially have to make the whole gameā¦ right?
Yes, that sounds about right. Itās completely dependent on the game as to how much that involves but you could very easily end up with the situation that you have to build most of the game to achieve it. Fortunately the programmer involved most in the framework supporting the game knew how to minimize the impact this had on us.
If thatās true, your investors will be really impressed when you manage to do the other 90% of the content in less than half the time!
I agree with this somewhat, actually. Iām working on a vertical slice, but it requires me to implement pretty-much all of my gameās features. My full game will have more maps and characters, but as far as code- all of the major systems will be finished by the time Iām done.
This is not for investors, though. Itās just for my own amusement.
Although the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes 90% of the time!
I find publishers are interested at any point from when you can show working gameplay, as long as you can explain what the final target is, and can give them the confidence the skills and commitment are in place to finish.
Thereās a period where this was true, back when you had to do things like write your own renderer or shell out hundreds of thousands to license one. These days, though? We can grab so much off-the-shelf stuff to get started, and we do not need fully fledged backing systems beyond that to get a vertical slice. You can take quick-and-dirty approaches to a lot of stuff because you know it doesnāt have to scale and it doesnāt have to support a large team or lots of content. You can do all sorts of one-off stuff, and then go and replace your one-offs with decent systems if your project gets greenlit.
Itās still not a useful process for all games, but I think that completely writing it off per that quote is a bit misguided or dated. Really, where a prototype shows whether or not your gameplay works, a vertical slice shows what youāre planning to give consumers.
Yeah what you are saying is kind of my idea for my project now. I not really worrying about if I am setting things up to be built from, but rather just trying to nail down art style and proof my concepts.But since I am doing the work anyway it does make sense to do some workflow exploration to figure out how I would want to do things once real production started.
But then some people tell me you donāt even need gameplay at all. Just a trailer and youāre good. So thatās why I try to get more opinions. Even if that was the caseā¦ I still like to do more preliminary work to feel like I got most things under control before I bring any real money into the project.
In large studios with a deep slate, vertical slices were done later in the process to start getting stakeholders excited and to do user testing. We did them way after prototypes, usually midway through development. But that was a different set up. A green light didnāt mean a game was actually going to be released, it just meant that enough was proven to devote development costs to it. Our green lights were based concept art, market research and a solid GDD. Maybe a prototype if there was gameplay or tech concern that needed to proven. Several tech prototypes and vertical slices were done along the way.
Also, since all our games at the time were based on huge ip, vertical slices were used to prove out art direction. Also just a few years back tech was changing much faster and games took a big longer to build, so often we start building a game before our target platform was even on the market. Weād spool up the backend and game play, and about a year before launch starting vetting visual fidelity against current hardware.
These days, with the smaller studios I work with, we donāt do vertical slices almost at all anymore. We prototype, but we pretty much work toward an early release and kind of use that. So many games today use the concept of early release / access that a vertical slice isnāt necessary and often a distraction of time that could be spend better building the game.
what constitutes an early release? This would seem to only make sense for an episodic game, right? As in, you build one level and release that, then the rest of the game is just iterations of that same concept? Or maybe adding more systems to an open world survival game? Something like that?
But basically you jusut release once you have basic mechanics and mvp art ready? And this EA time pays off becauseā¦ its like you get paid some money to get end user feedback? But what about the axiom āEA is your release.ā?
As far as I can tell, this axiom is not accurate. To begin with, if EA was equivalent to a release, it would be a relatively poor one simply because the game is generally nowhere near complete. I see EA is a journey, itās not an event. Itās an ongoing thing that, if handled right, builds momentum and publicity over time, rather than losing it.
Sure, you āuseā some of your revenue-generating potential, but the idea is to get it back with interest (hopefully a lot).
I think this talk is interesting in regards to EA.
In the Steam world at least, EA as of a few years ago meant literally whatever. There was a famous EA release that had a point and click movement system in like one room with no interaction. It actually had positive reviews at one point, until people started to realize that the game would never actually be finished.
Today, EA release is a major release and gamers more or less consider these as stand alone products. The most successful releases Iāve seen have only left out āend game contentā and balance. Theyāve also, all been rogue-lite or sandboxy - which offered hardcore fans a hundred hours+ even without āend game contentā.
From sales data Iāve seen, most successful EA games do most of their sales during EA, most often near EA launch.
From public data, on average, EA games do better than non-EA games in terms of sales.
Key things I took away is that they implemented means to gather analytics on there players behavior in the actual game world, and also that they set up system to completely involve EA gamers with production. Also, good game design, of course.
But all the smart decisions they made stemmed from their analytics system. At least thats what it seems like from video.
Both those things though require programmers who really know what they are doing, and have the time/resources to spend time implementing something like that in addition to making the actual game.
Analytics is pretty easy to set up, I had it going in alphas for BSG way back. Itās similar in difficulty to achievements, ie: most of the work is figuring out what you want to do, not implementing it.
You can also use achievements as bootleg analytics.
Oh yeah thats smart. Just setup your achievements to be things you wanna keep an eye on.
Guy in video made some good points about periodically marking where players where in game. As a way to keep tab on what people are doing in open world game. That seems like good idea too, especially in non-linear game.
Smooth talking often gets seen through. Authoritative talking showing you understand how to get to the finish and how you have the skills in place will help. But if you want money up front, credentials are very important.
Smooth like butter. Like jedi-mind trick level.