Wait for the Good Pitches

This week in my EAE capstone class, we have been working on developing game pitches. To get us thinking of ideas, we were assigned to find and play indie games and student games that we hadn't played before. One student game I came across was especially interesting and unique: Cloud. It's an older game, but I loved it. It is incredibly relaxing and has more of a focus on the sounds/feelings/experience than on difficult gameplay. It reminded me a lot of Proteus in that sense. I recommend checking it out sometime.

After playing a few games, we were asked to come up with 15 different ideas of our own. These weren't in-depth game design documents, but simple enough ideas to fit on a 3x5 card (similar to a typical elevator pitch).

We quickly pitched them to each other during class and, based on the feedback we received, selected one (or none) of the ideas that we wanted to refine into a one-page description. The next time we met, we presented these ideas to a smaller group of students, with more time available. The best pitches will be presented to the class and the best of those will be made into prototypes.

My idea was a game called Musika. The basic idea: A platformer where you collect parts of a song by defeating enemies, hitting blocks, etc., eventually unlocking the whole song. Using a little footage from Mario, I made a video showing an idea of how the mechanic might work.

I was a runner-up to present to the class, but in the end my game wasn't picked. Honestly, I don't mind because no matter what game I end up working on, I'll be able to add something to it and I'm confident it will turn out excellent. For me, the main take away from this experience has been:

• Pitch ideas are not sacred. There are lots of 'great' ideas that become terrible games and there are lot of mediocre ideas that are tweaked and perfected until they become amazing games.

On to making games. I'm excited to hear the selected pitches next week!