Fundbetter: Qs 1-3

Here's me going over the first three questions/requirements for the Fundbetter games project. With some thoughts. As always, these are just my opinions, your experiences and process may be very different. There isn't right or wrong.

1. The name of the project in the email’s subject line.

Check! Easy right?

Here’s the thing, I’m just saying this out loud because I’ve submitted and applied for a lot of things over the course of the last ten years professionally writing one way or another.

PAY ATTENTION TO REQUIREMENTS! These are not rules put in for other people. They’re not suggestions. If a company has standards, style guidelines, or requests like ‘include a picture of a red ballon…’ it doesn’t matter why they do. You just do what they said to do.

Why? Because you don’t know what the process looks like on their end. Maybe they need fonts 89pt tall because they post all their proposals on a huge digital white board. Maybe their visually impaired. Or maybe, (and perhaps most likely) they set those rules to see who can follow the rules and who can’t. Never assume ‘well, this probably doesn’t apply to me.’ If you have an impairment or other problem that leaves you unable to satisfy the requirements, you reach out and talk about it before you pitch. Fund better doesn’t really have anything I would consider a challenge, quite the contrary. They’re not asking for an essay written in a Word Document, for example, which I’ve seen, so probably putting the name of your game in the email’s subject line? Yeah. You can probably do that.

Unless you don’t have a name yet. In which case, time to come up with at least working title!

2. A one-paragraph description of the project.

Again, I’m not especially sweating this part because I’ve pitched a few games now on my own or with a team.

Here’s what I suggest though. See if it helps.

Look at your game, as a whole, what does the player spend a majority of the time doing? What are they rewarded for doing? And in the case of a more narrative focused game, what additional content are they rewarded with for doing what they’re doing? You can draw parallels, of course, and mention what you’re doing that’s unique, but there’s some pitfalls with that. Namely, don’t trash other games. It makes you look small and for all you know, the person reading your pitch is the #1 Superfan of the game you’re trashing. In which case, good luck with that, buddy. If you’re game is good, you don’t need to trash others. Second, be careful of ‘this game is X plus Y’ comparisons. The problem with “my game is basically Far Cry but with Flappy Bird mechanics” is that it isn’t showing what you’re actually doing. If you are literally making Flappy Bird plus Far Cry, I mean okay… but at least for this project? I don’t have high hopes. (That said, if you are making a narrative focused text centric Flappy Bird Far Cry clone um… I think you have to show me.)

What does that leave you with if you can’t say ‘its Nathan Drake but for smart people’ or ‘it’s firefly but steampunk’?

Here’s what I’m trying. I may adjust it before I send in my application, but this is my starting point.

The player, not a character, is given the notebook of a monster hunter. This is a collection of stories from the lives of a pair of sisters who have dedicated their lives to pushing back against the darkness. As the players read the main story of these sisters, they uncover a meta-narrative, with notes from the sisters and artifacts from their world as well as sections from a book their mother wrote but died before publishing. The game experience seeks to blur the lines between their world and ours with the notebook, the game, a liminal space to enter.

So, again, that’s just a first draft, but you get the idea. What is the player doing, what are their rewards for doing what they're doing, and so on.

3. What have you done so far? If you have notes, a playable build, a prototype, send us links.

Here’s where is starts to get potentially, intimidating for some, yeah? At least for me, the idea of laying out, indeed, justifying what work I’ve done so far is scary! Mostly because there’s a natural fear that whatever I’ve done is not enough. But! Taking stock like this, (and again later when you’ll be asked to look at how long the rest of development will take, eek!) is really important. Game development is iterative, it happens in phases and hopefully, you’ve been working with incremental goals all along, right? You have that running check list of stuff you gotta do that you’re checking every Monday, right?

If so, you’ve also got a check list of things you’ve already done! That’s great! (If not, you’ve got some work to do, but I think doing that to apply even if you don’t get the funding is super useful, so it’s worth the time.)

I don't currently have a playable build. But. I might get that together by the time I'm done this process because it seems like a good thing to have done in a format I can share.

Here’s what I have done, in a handy list because I like lists!

• I’ve picked my engine (Unity) and app to make it work in a way to match my skills. (Fungus for Unity.) I’ve taken a short Udemy course on Fungus for Unity so I have a pretty good understanding of what I need to finish this game.

• I’ve written almost all of the novel/script to back up the visual side of things. That is, the story is about 45 thousand words of a target of about 60 thousand words. So the core writing is about 75% complete. The rest is thoroughly outlined and prepared. I bounce a bit between writing and entering it into the game as I go.

• I have my UI basically laid out, (though I will probably fuss with the resolution and size of my images to up the resolution. That’s sort of next-step stuff.) I’ll show more of that with the next question.

• Of the stories roughly 60 scene/artifacts/events, 16 of them are complete and entered into the game. They run, they link together, the interface is working. I’m kinda stoked about it. That’s slower going than the writing for me, but it’s there and I know it works, so at least there’s that!

• I have a development blog where I’m putting tidbits, ideas, resources for other low-budget game designers and a series of articles outlining my application process.

So that’s about that. Tomorrow (or next time) I’ll tackle the ‘what does your game look like’ question. With more pictures! Yay!!