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Best Way To Sell a Game Concept?
dunng808 writes "If a couple of young, game-crazy guys wanted to get started designing a game with the intention of selling the concept, how should they proceed? In the music industry they would make a demo MP3. In the film industry they would write a script (and I would recommend lyx with the hollywood document class). Should they develop some sample game play with a well-known engine? Is the one in Blender good enough? This somewhat dated list suggests it is. Or should they focus on textual descriptions and static scenes made with Blender and the GIMP? Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?"
Not to contradict your experience, but this is exactly what happened with Portal. My memory is some students at DigiPen Institute of Technology (which has a video game major) created a free, proof of concept game called Narbacular Drop, which they demoed to some Valve execs who had come to visit the university. Valve liked it enough that they hired the entire team and advanced the concept into Portal.
Qxe4
I'm in the industry, in an expanding AAA-only studio that is just finishing a large project and embarking on multiple new ones.
The main poisonous idea in this thread is that ideas aren't worth shit. That's nonsense. Any idiot can pick up Games Programming Gems, XNA and get the skillz to make what they'll laughably label 'a vertical slice' inside of a year. Game studios are full of people with the skill to write AI, Physics, Post-processing and Shader code. Why are so many shite games produced by these studios? Because:
1) Their game concepts aren't very good
or
2) They lack the artistic, technical and design direction to tie together a mass of artists, coders and designers to realise those concepts
Pitfall 1 is just as dangerous to a studio as Pitfall 2. And 1 often leads to 2. If your concept isn't rich and well formed the design team won't understand the key concepts they're hitting, this will lead the code team to following misguided priorities. The engine won't be able to do all the stuff it needs to. The tools won't support asset creation or scripting in the right way. This lack of proper technical support will lead to bandwidth reduction for artists and designers, which just distracts everyone from focusing on the key gameplay and stylistic concepts. All of this has stemmed from an incomplete or poorly communicated concept.
A concept team spends 80% of time in paper and white boards; playing with lego or boardgames; making simple mods of other games - basically _anything_ that isn't:
- writing half a games engine
- spending hours making and processing assets
- fully implementing a world complete with AI, postprocessing and all the other shit that has no place in a _concept demo_
That said, as an industry outsider or indie developer it is very important therefore to demonstrate your ability to realise gameplay concepts. So...I'd say do the following, in order of importance:
0) Don't even think about using blender, it's 'game engine' is not a game engine, you might as well use VRML...or just hit yourself repeatedly in the balls
1) Become obsessed with games and have deep and broad knowledge of what makes some games mechanistically and stylistically great and others shit
2) Storyboard your ideas, go through several scenarios to demonstrate you understand how your mechanics work and why they make a great game
3) Get XNA for free and hack your examples together. Only do this if you genuinely believe a playable demo does more for you than your storyboards. More likely it will obfuscate what's good about the mechanics, because it takes a lot of time and iteration to get it right, although that depends on the genre, some are more amenable to prototypes than others.
The main problem with the above reply is that it mixes the skills of concept and design (which are one skillset in the industry) and code (which is an entirely different one). You do get some designers who can write code, and they can be useful, particularly for tools. You do get some coders who also design, that's good from a studio culture perspective, because you don't get the tribalism that can occur. But make no mistake - if a studio is hiring a designer, they care about your design skills, they generally couldn't give a shit if you can write code. They give a shit that you understand why games are good, why they're bad and how you design mechanics well.