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Pitching Game Concepts To Developers?
Andonyx writes "When I was in college, every third person I met had a screenplay they wanted to pitch. Now every fifth person I meet has a game idea. Well, there are books-a-plenty that teach you how to format, pitch and sell screen plays, but what about the aspiring game designer? Where does someone with some design experience but not the resources to develop an entire proof of concept go to pitch a game idea to an established developer? Or does that even happen? Thought the Slashdot crowd might have some useful advice." This question touches a little on the 'supervising game designer' concept discussed a couple of weeks back, but more specifically asks how/whether you can successfully pitch externally-created game concepts and documents to developers.
"Or does that even happen?"
No it doesn't. Probably they throw it straight to the can without even reading it. If they did and would happen to be developing a similar game, you could maybe sue them for stealing your idea.
And besides, everybody at a games company produces a pitch for lunch if they want to. Best thing you can do is get some great additional skills that a game company needs, like programming, art, level desining or maybe writing and get a job somewhere. Then you have a much better change of getting your pitches through. But I've never heard of a company who'd do a game based on an independet desing outside of the company.
Or maybe get a job at a publihers, write a crappy desing based on a crappy lisense and force it down a 3rd-party developers throath. (bitter? noooo..)
I'm one of the developers of the now retail Half-Life MOD called Day of Defeat. We developed a free Half-Life MOD, had it become successfull, and now are regular developers for Valve, and the game is a retail product.
First, don't look for developers, become one. A really common joke in the MOD community is some guy that says something like, "I got a great idea for a MOD! It's gonna have lots of guns, and models and explosions and stuff. I've got it 90% done but just need a coder and a modeler and a skinner and a mapper and a sound guy. As soon as I get them we'll finish the last 10%!" Basically, "idea guys" who can't actually contribute content are worthless for a MOD team. Everyone must contribute real value and content. No dead wood.
Second, the best way to get a MOD on the road to success is to be successful. By that I mean release it to the public (even in a crude beta format) and get the world to check it out. There is a new Half-Life mod called Battle Grounds that's come out recently. It's a US Revolutionary War game. Very crude in some ways, but it's already got some people playing it. 32 servers and 66 players in the last hour. That's not many, but if you look at the stats for a lot of other mods, it's doing pretty well. Anyway, the makers of that game are learning something and evolving their game because it is being played. Not just "conceptualized" on a piece of paper.
Third, don't think you need to be a game developer to develop a game. None of us that made Day of Defeat were. Sure we had some skills but none of us were professionals. But we learned quite a bit and came pretty far in the process of creating and reviving our game.
The summary? Don't talk about it, do it.