Pitches
Flee The Vashar (Solo Pitch):
Technical Summary:
With the acquisition of the brief, we were tasked with developing a Solo Pitch that fit in line with the brief of Journey to show the experience that refugees go through to educate the players of the games we will make. I started by creating a PowerPoint that I used to come up with Ideas and expand on what I wanted to include within my pitch.​
When I was developing my idea, I didn't want to touch on the realism behind the experiences; I wanted them to be light-hearted but still have important messages about refugees. To combat this, I wanted to focus on an environment that wasn't similar to the real world but could still offer the messages and lessons behind the gameplay. I chose to follow a group of human colonists on an alien planet who are invaded by an alien race with the desire of conquest and control. I chose an age rating of 16 because I wanted these aggressive aliens to seem aggressive and brutal in comparison to the humble human race they are conquering. Furthermore, I also felt this rating was appropriate because the player would be able to kill the aliens and the aliens would be able to kill the player. I wanted the aliens to be this creepy and unsettling design that would stand out from the look of a human, something that would look intimidating and make the player feel small and powerless in comparison. This idea would focus more on the mental journey of getting from point A to B, and the risks that the player would have to take in order to secure their own safety. ​​
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Reflection:
On reflection of this project, I definitely have a lot of room to improve on developing a pitch on my own. I personally find my playboards to be very lacking in understanding them and the different outcomes of choosing to follow a feature. I should consider adding text descriptions to further explain and for other people's ease. Although the asset list isn't essential in this stage of the pitches, it doesn't explain a great deal about the asset or put into scale what elements I actually want to include inside the game. I also don't feel like enough of the elements of the game are explained correctly to make it easily understandable in future.
Tactics, Tea, and Tentacles (Group Pitch)
Technical Summary:
After our Solo Pitches, we were assembled into our groups that we will work in throughout Synoptic. From here, we began working on the idea that we would put forward and work on for the next 4 months.
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We moved ahead with the idea I had developed in the Solo Pitch, but with two extra heads we could create something visually appealing and more well-developed than I came up with on our own. We decided that a more meaningful way to express this journey would be to follow the Sci-Fi genre, but instead of being two alien races, it would be a human group attempting to take control of Mars. As previously mentioned, I didn't want to lean into the realistic elements of the Refugee Journey and focus on telling a lighthearted story that masks the harsh reality of this world. We continued with working inside a PowerPoint to expand on our pitches and the ideas we would come up with, as well as this being a collaborative document where we all added our own elements to develop this idea further. We chose a retro-futurism aesthetic because we felt like it would stand out and come across as a unique style in comparison to other projects we had seen previously. Not only that, but we also took a lot of the violent decisions from my original solo pitch out to really focus on the more cartoon and move to a more comical sense, rather than the brutality, pushing the message in a more subtle way.
Reflection:
On reflection of this Pitch, I think that our pitch went well and captures a unique twist on my original idea. We have a very unique art style of 1950's Retro-Futurism which we thought would help express an interesting and memorable style to our game. As a part of the feedback we received, I also agree with explaining more on the environment and expressing it through a drawing to help establish the overall look. Also more on the gameplay, camera movements and how the game would follow in a linear path, start to finish. I think I should have included a slide where we linked back to the brief and explained how and why this fits to have also cleared up with some of the confusion that we received after out pitch. Moving forward from this, the focus will be on explaining what I am working towards more clearly and how things will work in the long run.