Leadership

Being a team leader is of course a lot of work. Most of my time has been spent discussing with the team what needs to be done to ensure everybody understands it and we are making consistent changes. This makes it extremely difficult to find time to contribute to the work myself. In a professional situation, the team leader won't be one of the developers and will have their full time dedicated to the management activities. Unfortunately, for this course, I have to balance both.

Image from The Art of Balance and Leadership

Gathering feedback

This week the team shared a questionnaire and a demo build of the game with people from online communities to gather feedback on the prototype and test the feasibility of the game. James prepared the questionnaire and shared it with the team for feedback. After a couple of quick iterations, it was ready to be sent out.

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Since we have some issues with lighting when the game is built in our Continuous Integration pipeline, we couldn't just share a link to our demo page. To go around this issue, I created a Windows build for us to include with the questionnaire.

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Lastly, I shared the questionnaire with gaming communities I am part of in Discord as well as with the gamers in my work's Slack. Overall, we got a good number of replies and the final scores were very positive. You can check out next week's development log for our pitch presentation where you will find more details on the results.

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Pitch Preparation

This week was our deadline to record the pitch in order to have enough time to edit the video and submit the assignment. In order to achieve that we had to complete all changes from the feedback gathered.

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Firstly, Luke Quinn and I worked on restructuring the presentation to increase the cohesion of the information presented. This also meant that I had to merge the Influences and the Target Audience slides as well as Story and Progression slides due to them having very similar content. Following the slide merger, I reworked the Design slide as it had some significant differences to the formatting of the other slides, so I brought it in line with the rest. Lastly, I recorded gameplay GIFs and took new screenshots of the game to add to the pitch deck.

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Furthermore, I suggested an alternative view to the Roadmap slide which utilises the format used by Diablo and other game pitches (Founders Kit, 2021) which I then shared with Luke Quinn to see if he prefers it. Additionally, I helped James restructure and summarise his Prototype Feedback slide notes and suggested some changes to Luke Quinn's Sales Analysis notes.

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Once everything was in place, I reviewed the presentation to ensure we have a consistent tone of voice and styling throughout.

Finally, we had to record the pitch. At the beginning of our practice session, I drove the discussion to figure out what the best way is to split the presentation and we ended up splitting it by rough presentation duration. We didn't try to be precise, so some might end up speaking more than others, however, we wanted to ensure we don't jump between each other often as it breaks the flow of the pitch. After some practice runs we recorded the presentation 3 times using Zoom (2021) and it was all down to Luke Perry's editing skills to finalise the video.

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It took significant effort to get the pitch in place in the way it is today. The team really collaborated and joined all efforts to achieve the level of polish. Since the pitch is one of the most important tasks in getting a game funded (Davis, 2021), normally I would dedicate a lot more time to creating something unique and extremely polished. However, I am very happy with our result, considering the little time we had to complete it. Requiring students to work on multiple high priority tasks seems to be a recurring theme in this masters course. Hopefully, our development logs won't suffer because of the effort we've put into the pitch deck.

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References

Davis, C., 2021. Gamasutra - How To Pitch Your Project To Publishers. [online] Gamasutra.com. Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134571/how_to_pitch_your_project\_to\_.php?print=1 [Accessed 16 August 2021].

Founders Kit. 2021. Pitch Decks. [online] Available at: https://www.notion.so/Pitch-Decks-f56e38c13fe6417f8379859e74367e1a [Accessed 16 August 2021].

Zoom Video Communications. 2021. Video Conferencing, Cloud Phone, Webinars, Chat, Virtual Events | Zoom. [online] Available at: https://zoom.us/ [Accessed 16 August 2021].