So You're Ready to Pitch to a Publisher? You're Not

[Music] so my name is Becca Saltzman and I am the CEO of fin G I run a small independent development studio and publisher in Grand Rapids Michigan for my husband Adam Saltzman I am talking to you today basically so you're ready to pitch a publisher you're not it's a nice like kind of mean title but it's not because I mentor a lot of teams not only just my own teams but also probably a lot of you in the audience have in the past two to three years sent us something and we have just sort of worked sort of through it with you and a lot of sort of themes have come out of going through these pitches so I put together a talk you may know me just a little bit of background not only did you finish but we are launching Overland this year we're gonna be published or a publisher on wool montz warehouse tunic

which is Andrews show licensed game we launched knighthoods a couple years ago and it's never going to end just keeps coming out and a long long long time ago my husband made Canabalt so you're welcome for all the endless runners and we did my favorite game which is hundreds which is actually my first design credit even though I'm still only in the special things we forget to update it every time we update the game that's what it's like to be me so yeah here it is hey friend so I've been working on this thing and I was asked for this do you and Adam have time to and the answer is usually no but we try to make time so what I'm gonna go through sort of fourth key things these are kind of your takeaways for today the first of which before you pitch understand which you are making and this was always kind of fun before you pitch understand the audience to who you're talking to before you pitch understand

the pitch which I know is a little bit secure this but we'll get there and then before you pitch understand the deliverables basically what what are you being asked to give and I've been really surprised at the disconnect between the language that I use every single day and the language that my developers understand and we'll talk a little bit about some of those terms as we go okay I'm going to back up just a tiny tiny bit to give a little bit of context on the industry so the state of game development right now often is like I'm gonna make a million dollars I'm gonna live my dream I'm gonna drive a fancy car and have a house because this one person we saw like did that that's not the way this works if there's a lot of hedging your bets there's a lot of like diversifying and there is a ton of contracting to make sure that we are sustainable so the idea is from the outside looking in is like wow this is

amazing we could do our dream and make money at it but the reality is this industry is very very hard the Gold Rush mentality is super dangerous and a lot of people don't understand that when a game sells a hundred thousand copies like you're like oh wow okay so a hundred thousand copies at 70% $700,000 amazing there were 12 people working on this game for five years so I mean good job we've paid groceries for a few years and maybe bought some toilet paper but you didn't make enough to actually like build something else so you have to understand revenue splits people cost money high production values engineers and artists and musicians and our equipment really expensive and we have years in development god bless Overland but that's five years by the time I launch it five and a half years night in the woods was over three

years and the darn games just not you I mean we haven't launched iOS yet we still have another launch on the game so yeah understanding sort of like the cost involved going into talking to someone who you want money from or help from it's really really important so Adam made this slide probably bout a year ago which always makes me super depressed when I look at it but it's really useful when I talk about the budgets that I prepare for our Finn G projects so most games don't sell very much three hundred to three thousand copies our budgets when we put together over lines little bit hikes for at five years that's another story and I blame Adam but most of our budgets are designed to be about selling 30,000 copies I know I can do that just based on our track record on our history I've never sold under that so I

know I can hit that number which means I know I can pay for my game we have our hopefully sales at 300,000 copies and for fin G that's across a lot of platforms so I've got you know steam GOG HIO Humble PlayStation Xbox switch I'm counting all of them and then we don't even talk about tier 5 like sometimes we'll talk about half a million copies when we're like drinking a little bit too much on a Friday night or something but really when we are really talking about things we're more talking like hundred hundred and fifty thousand copies because like I can count two hands kind of from last year which games did that in the indie space it's a very tight market so this is also this should be thought of when you're building your team the number of people in the live link of time these these are

your constraints as the box you're drawing or under project and if you go outside of the box you literally don't have enough money to make it so yeah let's go in to understand what you are making because those budgets matter when you talk about understanding what you're making I'm going to talk today about some prototypes so prototypes are not vertical slices if I opened up my email right now which would be really embarrassing so I have about 350 unread messages in my inbox I got about 20 pitches a day I don't publish a lot of games I publish like one at a time but I get 20 pitches a day and the number of prototypes that I have coming into my inbox one is astounding and makes me realize that nobody actually knows how to talk to a publisher but also I don't ever want to see a prototype prototypes again are not vertical slices they're not system complete proof of a concept they are like early proof of concepts or like I

have something here I might be able to do something with it they are simply proof that mechanically you are on to something and someone like me and I'm just going to back up a little bit I don't come from a background in games I'm in charge of a game studio but I literally play games through Super Nintendo and never played a 3d game until I was like in my 20s in college and I got made fun of for it and then I stopped playing it so like I don't have this limitless knowledge of everything that's been made for us you know 38 years of my life and if people come to me with a prototype I often can't figure out what the heck is happening when a box is bouncing around a screen atom could and it might be really cool but I don't know what I can't parse that so prototypes in general and I'm going to show you some examples of some of the Finn G game prototypes I've got some tunic stuff night in the woods stuff and Overland stuff I don't know if Andrews in here or not but we call him Dorito fox an Andrew

approached me in 2016 we didn't know each other and I was barely a publisher at that point and he just wanted us to mentor him he wanted us to talk about his game and the thing that he had and at that point he had a prototype he had this tiny little arena a little like Square Arena and he had Dorito Foxx little 3d Zelda Foxx running around and all it did was sort of like dodge and roll and like swing around his sword there were no levels there was nothing there was a combat arena and tunic is not a puzzle game tunics whole gameplay sort of revolves around really interesting combat situations which was interesting for us at that point because I mean it was a little Zelda fox-like he had he has a lot of nostalgia for sort of like old 80's and 90's games especially cuz he's about the same age as us and it was interesting for us at that point to sort of see like oh this is something

different I'm not interested in publishing but we were interesting men interested in mentoring this you know random kid who came up to us after a talk at GDC and I'm showing you these different prototypes because this is an action-adventure game night in the woods however is an adventure game it was kick-started in 2013 and the first thing that the team did is they made we call him the supplementals so there's longest night and lost consolation longest night is technically night in the woods prototype because they had to figure out how to make this elaborate narrative like spaghetti ball of text work and they made a very small 30 minute story it did have polished art however Scott would disagree he would love to redo all the art in this because the game had it was like two months old it adjustment kick-started and he hates how it looks but this is wasn't a prototype it was a proof-of-concept and people played it and they liked the gameplay and that's a totally different way that you can approach sort of making the early early

versions of your game I did not base publishing night in the woods off of this this is Overland's prototype and if you see Overland now you're like how are these two games the same thing I and every one snow I show this we were like man I want to play that version I was like agreed it was really fun we could play it for like 45 minutes super super hard but it was a 2d pixel art grid we still have the grid in our like 3d like beautiful like rotating biomes the mechanics were solid we have the car we have the people we have gas we have those monsters which literally stayed in until our vertical slice they were just in a 3d space for a long time I think that might be a baseball bat or a stick it's a weapon it's a stick shaped thing and when we had these prototypes out we

were taking them to test players were they engaged where did they want to keep playing even though it was ugly but I wasn't taking this to someone like me I was taking my game to someone like you so we lived in Austin at the time and we would take this Overland prototype out among our game developer friends who would be able to look at something that was kind of ugly and could they parse the gameplay that was there and were we onto something so but the next thing is do publishers pay for prototypes no no they don't I was on the train I was on trained Jam infinite train jam we were there forever I live there now but Richard the Martian was on the train and he's what Call of Duty 3 I was good at mixed up cuz I met him when he was a professor uncharted thank you I always get it messed up uncharted 3 he worked with a me but he was on the train and we

were in the back and he's writing a book right now he's on sabbatical and he's writing a book that has a whole chapter about basically everything in this talk and we were just sitting there shouting and he was like yeah well publishers when they pay for prototypes and I'm like hold the phone no no no no no no no new publishers don't pay for prototypes we're working on 30,000 unit budgets and he's like that's excuse my language that's I was like yeah but the markets really terrifying and prototypes like eight weeks five people decent I mean let's let's go half decent at like maybe five thousand dollars a month that's what kind of numbers we're looking at you're like that's a lot of a thirty thousand dollar budget so I imagine there is probably someone in this room who has been paid for a prototype and I want to buy you a drink and talk to you to find out how you did it but when you email a publisher or a

console representative or literally anyone if you say I want money to pay for a prototype they will laugh and they will sometimes maybe if your ideas interesting or but at that point you literally don't have anything to play they will just kind of delete your email or like sorry we're not interested we don't have time so the second thing is it often takes several prototypes to even land on something that's cool so imagine a publisher paying for one prototype but what do we pay for night three more Overland is like nine months of one game plus like Adams three-day game jam in the summer plus like some other BS he pulled out of a file folder from like multiple years ago and he squished him all together and that's what was the beginning of Overland's prototype it was actually like four or five things before we actually landed on our prototype so yeah publishers won't pay for them you can ask if you're established I guess but if

you kind of don't have a track record they're gonna be like no no no no I that's too big of a risk so in the understand what you're making cool we finally have a prototype that works awesome you're like have already you're like halfway no I like you started going up a hill instead of like sitting around cooking at the bottom so the next thing once you get a prototype you have to make a vertical slice and this is the sort of thing that publishers do want to see because this is a full experience it's taking the whole gameplay loop of why's your game is cool into a short play session you can start at the beginning go through your gameplay loop it's sticky it's awesome and then it ends and it's polished now there's one caveat here which is if you're making a systems-based game and I'll talk about that in a second so prototype for tunic and you've probably if you've seen your

neck this is the version that you're familiar with I've been running this demo forever it's the one that played at e3 last year it starts at the beginning the Fox washes up you sort of wake up you wave because he literally does you can just turn around like wave at the screen and then you go up you find your stick you run through the forest you like beat up some cute baddies you find your sword you do a little bit of controller stuff where you're like equipping and then we put you in with the cherry blossom boss technically this is like five or six hours in this cherry blossom boss but in my demo in my vertical slice I will take you there within 15 minutes because I need to show you that you're collecting weapons you're equipping them you're on an adventure there are save points it is combat focused and there's bad guys that's our gameplay loop the fact that the world is enormous you can play it for like 40 not like all of that stuff those are like

bullet points but in a vertical slice you want someone to play your game and be like holy crap this is so cool yes this is awesome but they don't know your budget yet they don't need to know any of that they need to be so damn excited about what they're playing that their eyes glass over to the other pieces of the pitch so you need to build your vertical slice and the cool thing is people like up but what am I going to do with it afterwards I've been taking this to every pax in III and Regional Conference for literally years because every single person in and us for us Indies is a new consumer is a new player our reach is so tiny that we can play the same demo especially if it's good especially if it has hooks for ever and when you're at a show you want to push people through as fast as possible why is it cool remember the title get out of my booth I gotta get somebody else in here because every person who sits down needs to buy my game because I got to hit my

30,000 units because I got to pay it back so think about your game it sounds callous I get it it really sounds callous but when you look at your design how can you get people on boarded as fast as possible because when they're at home in their underwear on their couch playing games who cares really they already bought it they're gonna like it they're going to get there but you have to get them over the hump to even be interested in the first place show them the hook and show it early and that includes people like me that includes consoles that includes journalists you want them to talk about your game show them what's cool show it fast night in the woods took a slightly different tact so night in the woods vertical slice came earlier than we expected we had made like they were the team I was early in the project the team made longest night and then we got asked to exhibit at e3 2002 long ago

2015 2014 I don't know but we they built an entire portion of the game as a way to flesh out what the city looked like so in this I had one like really short actually it wasn't really short because this Scott and Alec design so you can just wander around literally forever you sort of like woke up in Mays room left you had like a conversation it was like cranky old the creaky old guy that get off my porch type outside and then you went through the town you were able to explore a bit of the town's really important you're able to get up on the powerlines so you could show maze movement you had band practice and then you ate doughnuts and then you met up with Greg on a rooftop because he'd stolen a garden gnome and then you sort of you have a choice you can either throw it off the rooftop or not 99% of

that game is literally not in the final product of night in the woods hilariously it technically was in the console version because we had a bug where somebody hot keyed into it on launch week and we couldn't figure out why it was haunted and why they could access that a good moment we were on train jam 2017 when that happened yeah adventures in Indies is great but this particular demo I carried it around for three years I showed it to literally every console on the planet and like everybody at e3 pax PlayStation experience this is what travelled with it because it showed exactly what night in the woods is like if you play it the only thing that feels off is like the gradients in the back feel weird and like the text isn't quite perfect like you can tell it's not perfect Town Center I think I even has still have a screenshot from this that's in the main marketing materials like you can't tell the game is like 14 hours

long but this is a very small piece that we cut out very early on it was proving that this design worked people loved that they loved the demo I would have crowds in my booth playing this demo where you literally only read now I'm going back a little bit this ugly thing this is Overland's vertical slice so we have an action-adventure game with tunic we have an adventure game and now we have a very heavy systems based strategy game we don't polish art in a strategy game super early but we did polish the hell out of the systems so you can play through the entire overlying game loop with a pretty ugly UI but that's really early start to finish so you drive in collect squad collect fuel have very close encounters on the exact same grid base like size that we have now and get out and you'd be able to do that in the

randomly generated world through different areas so we had like two biomes because we didn't have a city scape yet so it started in the grasslands and they went into the woodlands that was our early prototype and I took this to shows I had to play it on a mouse and keyboard which was not ideal but it worked people who loved strategy games were able to sit down and play this for 45 minutes and some I had to kick him out of the booth which is like awesome on a systems-based game at a pax doesn't usually show particularly well so we called these sort of in the more system space things first playable because vertical slice implies polished art when I talk about strategy we definitely sort of like this is a first playable it is a complete gameplay loop it goes through all the mechanics and could talk about them intelligently and then after that we start putting down polished art so oh my goodness we have vertical slices amazing we can play it our friends can

play it we even maybe let some of our fan we play it people maybe are into the genre now we got to really talk about like who are we who are we talking to who are we pitching to and I'm going to back up a little bit now and I'm gonna go through a couple of terms that I'm going to use and I didn't realize that people didn't know what these meant and if I if you do know pat yourself on the back and don't leave me a nasty no on the reviews that say I knew everything she was talking about a lot of people don't know this and I was shocked as well so the first one is simchah p-- I had somebody on train think that it meant a simulated ship which makes a lot of sense I was talking to Michael Molinari or at least like well that makes sense instead of simultaneous ship so simultaneous ship sim ship means I am shipping on PC and PlayStation on day one and when you're talking to a

publishing partner or a porting partner or any of this these matter you must know what sim ship means I'm shipping on iOS and Android on the same day I'm shipping on if you're ludicrously crazy PC and PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo on day one when these games drop on the same day that's siming and if you know that awesome if you don't it's an important term to know a second one I even just threw out in a sentence without meaning to porting partner I do not make the ports of my game I do not make my game work on Nintendo I hire a porting partner is an external studio that costs money to hook those games up for me and sort of helped me through the certification process a lot of Indies will do this internally but when you are talking to someone else knowing whether you are using a porting partner or not is important because it has a lot of

questions one financial - do you know how to do this if you're doing it internally have you ever done this before which is an important question to ask yourself before you decide to commit to it and the other one is platform holder this is also platform holder storefront console representative all these things I'll refer to kind of the same person which is not us somebody with money so platform holder is Nintendo storefront steam like they all are all are interchangeable but these are words that we will literally throw around without realizing you don't know what they mean and then I've been on the receiving end of this I had to learn all these terms I just kind of felt stupid sitting there like I couldn't ask that question and I don't want you to be in that position so yeah those are three terms there's probably a ton more which I could I could go on forever I did a whole workshop in Uruguay about like most of this stuff but it was four hours long so this is a condensed version so who are

we pitching to and there's a lot of people on this list that we are going to be pitching to it is not just people with money so one you are pitching to your team so you need to understand the words and language you use while you're pitching to your team also the assets they're going to require to understand what you're talking about you were going to be pitching to people who play games in your title genre it's real easy for me to talk to strategy players about overland actually light it's real easy for Adam to talk to strategy players about Overland usually they will start throwing around terms I don't know what they're talking about and then I just sit there and feel stupid and ask later what the hell did that mean but you that's those are the easy people to talk to they're already excited about your genre you're gonna talk to people and you're gonna pitch to people who don't play games in your genre or just literally don't play games which we do all the time we are at PAX there is somebody that comes up with they don't

play games they're just there to hang out because they got invited along and you have to talk to them about your game and extra points hardmode if you can get them to play it you have to talk to journalists who are very different from the people above this platform dev relations who are very different they have different goals in mind you have to talk to investors who have money and their concerns are different from everybody above this they overlap a lot with platform dev Relations but investors are money they are just money and you have to talk to publishers who are people who are so excited about your game that they are willing to take the risk and add it to their library to put it out next with all their other stuff also make money that's a thing but they their concerns are different from everybody else on the list on this list and you need to understand who you're talking to and how you're talking to them in your pitch because all these

people are a version of your pitch sorry I love this so the idea that often the best ways to talk about your game comes from people out or comes from inside like I know the most about my game I know exactly how to talk about it that's BS I guarantee you that whatever you decided is the appropriate way to talk about your game is it has holes in it often the best ideas come from people outside of your development process and outside of your team who are explaining your game back to you and I'm encouraging you to steal all the words they're saying every single one of them be the raccoon take all the food and run everything I say about Overland my one line Overland pitch literally came from a journalist and a random person at a pax Overland is its Overland is a

procedurally generated no no I have liked metadata in my head right now so I've like five versions of this oh I should have written it down so I didn't forget it because I have the long version I'll get there I'll throw it out in a second and who the journalists came up with a new genre which was survival strategy which was perfect we like it encompasses exactly what Overland is like instantly and the post-apocalyptic road trip across North America that's the end of it like literally with somebody's like oh yeah you're on like a post-apocalyptic address really it was so perfect I was like oh my god write this down right now like instantly this is perfect like you're playing a survival strategy viable strategy game about a road trip about while you're driving across post-apocalyptic America and then you can like fall out of that in a really like natural way like you

are stealing gas collecting squad stealing a car and scavenging for supplies like you can sort of like condense all this down in like two sentences we didn't come up with that we're not smart enough for that we just borrowed it from people who are telling us literally about our own game that had been living in our house for years other places that you get this information from people in your community who are playing your game we were just on train jam and I was playing a friend Jake he was making a card game and I will break virtually every game and I broke his as well because I play everything wrong but we were playing the game he's like I need you to describe everything that's happening like just talk while you're playing that is an incredibly useful thing to do and it kind of makes players a little bit uncomfortable but if all you're doing is listening and maybe asking questions here and there this is how you're going to find out what your game actually is so talk to people make

people tell you about your own game yeah yeah I'm gonna tell you about this now so I just wanna be sure wasn't later I I'm not sure how many people here are familiar with panorama Kolb it's this really beautiful musical interactive experience that we published years ago made by David Kanaga and Fernando her my Joe and they're both incredibly brilliant panorama chol is basically impossible to describe to any human alive and I took it to shows because I'm like let's try to figure this out and I still couldn't figure it out we just like just the lengthy forever sort of like manipulating landscapes with like MIDI boards and it's beautiful and the music's incredible and that's too long and people are glazing over I'm like whatever just play it and that's what we sort of fell to just play it just play it and then one person at it's like a party X or something like it wasn't even like a Big Show's dude came by and he's

like I find this game fascinating I love it but I can't describe it he's like this is a challenge and he like just left I thought I'd never see him again and it was the next day he came running back by and he's like I got it it is Fantasia for video games instant it's perfect it is completely perfect I can't put that in an article I can't say that I can hint at it in an interview or something but it heard like the common person that was my pitch in a sentence it's Fantasia for video games you're manipulating a soundscape and a landscape to create a beautiful experience done so thank you random dude at r-tx in like 2015 I don't even know who he is but it was so useful at that point so listen to people how are they describing your game and literally steal those words please watch out for acronyms especially when you're talking

to general public and especially when you're talking to publishers if you're making an RPG oh I don't know what any of those acronyms mean I have to google them and if you say it in person I have to pull out my phone be like does is this a thing or did they just invent it and a lot of people literally just invent new acronym on the front of our PG that don't mean anything and then sometimes they say I invented a new genre I'm sure you did but we don't know what it means there's got to be a better way so be careful with your acronyms and ask yourself right now are you so far in game development culture that your language cannot be parsed by a regular person next time you go home test yourself it's like try to get into a conversation with like anyone not in games and see how many times you have to stop and explain yourself and then use those skills of the stopping and explaining yourself for when you talk to anyone outside of games I do it all the time when I go home and talk to Adams parents Adams dad worked

in computers so he's like definitely like tech management but our specialties are so far like on the opposite side so like we'll talk shop which is really fun talking shop with your father-in-law because he's retired now and he's like yeah tell me about all this bureaucracy BEC but I have to stop myself and explain through all the pieces so then I don't lose him in a conversation and it might be really easy I might say third party my third party dev relations means literally nothing to anyone outside of this room or this conference it might even mean anything here does anyone know not know it's okay third party dev relations thank you third party dev relations is my Sony representative they're the persons in charge of independent game developers in Sony they have a whole division called third party and that's the person you talk to you I don't get to talk to second party which usually there's like some money involved like the second party they're like more triple AE games or the consoles investing money in them

and then the first parties like they literally just own it second party gets a little wish she saw it's like the easy version but we are third party if you're indie you're third party so somebody throws that name out that's what they're talking about but I have to talk I have to talk through that if I talked it literally anyone outside of games so yeah there's also like within the game itself Overland all those regions we call them internally we call them biomes nobody uses that word in real life come on and I have to stop Adam regularly when he does interviews like regions air is sections of the United States geographic locations literally anything else but biome most people can spell the damn word don't use it the average person doesn't know what roguelike is I know everyone in here is like really why I still need a definition on the regs and I'm technically making a roguelike it has roguelike pieces and I'm like I don't know I just can't memorize it and now all of your

like this woman is an idiot it's fine crafting if you throw it on crafting outside of literally people at this conference what are you talking about the ability to make things use the words that actually means so we in Overland especially we use like close calls we use narrow escapes not just a strategy game it's a sprawling story words that evoke emotion words that evoke gameplay but we don't rely on a gamer language so yeah you might need to know the required required terminology but if you're talking to a lot of people especially people with money investors they may not know words like roguelike words like crafting and that is okay explain them so you got to meet your audience halfway can you talk to experts and also to those who know nothing about video games practice practice all the time can you

quickly identify common ground in a conversation and explain common complex terms and shared experience this is one is really hard so that means you're actually paying attention when you're talking to see if people look away or if they're trying to escape or if they sort of toned out or if they like took a step back like there's a lot of a lot of body language that's there that will tell you if somebody has no idea what that if you're talking about and do you know how your work might fit into the broader culture of media have you even thought about how your game fits into like how people are playing today what's going on politically what cool movies have come out is there a neat book have you even thought about it because that will help you talk about your game my game is about post-apocalyptic America come on like night in the woods we didn't start out with night in the woods coming out like literally after like our last American election but it did and we just change like we knew we're gonna be asked a bunch about this because it's

about like a small town in the middle America with like people why do people stay in small places like think about these things when you're talking about your game so yeah okay so we identified what we're making and we have a vertical slice to show and hopefully we've identified at least the person in front of us that we're trying to talk to so now what we have stuff that's awesome we need to understand our pitch materials yay now we actually have to talk to somebody that we want to impress pitching this is my favorite slide of all time I use it literally forever I am NOT responsible for our Adam did don't tell people lore that is boring trash don't make stuff up that's a bad idea

somewhere in the middle there's a lie that could be true and boring trash that might be interesting that's your pitch I can't take responsible for this Adam made this and I've been literally laughing about it for a year but it's so useful with games like the number of people that come up to me and shout Laura at me like oh just don't do it I don't care about the Wizards I don't care about the space machines Marines I literally don't care what's your gameplay loop what's the mechanic why is it fun that's what I want to know why is it fun why am I going to sit down and play this if it's the story tell me why the story matters in a cultural context don't tell me the story I want to read the book want to watch the movie I want to play the game to experience the story so when

we talk about may the cat who's a 20 year old college dropout who moves home to a Rust Belt town in Middle America instantly you know the setting the place and how old she is and she just dropped out of college and she starts hanging around with her friends screwing around and like vandalizing things she's gonna end up in the woods and she's going to go through some stuff but I don't need to tell you anything more than that that's all the lore you need about night in the woods I don't need to tell you about mental illness I don't need to tell you about fighting with her mom I don't need to tell you that her dad also like lost his like Union job I don't need to tell you about the mines I don't need to tell you about I don't need to tell you about any of those things who's the main character what's she doing why do I want to experience her life with her so yeah good pitches are in the middle leave out the boring trash leave out the lies even though those are real fun leave them out and once you have that you are going to put together a pitch document sorry we

build these in something like keynote or PowerPoint and I'm going to give you a few reasons why one when you pitch that is not the only time that pitch document will be used when you build these pitches you are going to save them off on a PDF you are going to email them to the person you're talking to and the reason for that is the person you're pitching to is not the decision-maker they literally have to go and talk to somebody else they in four consoles they have to take it back to the portfolio team they will take your pitch deck in they'll print it out usually so it's gonna look like garbage so make sure it's big and splashy and they will put it down in a meeting so I've got seven billion each week and they will discuss your game without you standing there to explain it so my pitch documents are really really simple first page key art which I'll talk about basically big pretty splash screen and the title and then I put on the bottom of it what I want I want to be an Xbox console launch

exclusive I want to be a PlayStation 4 or Playstation 5 launch title I want to be on so it I want your money whatever pick pick who it's for and put it at the bottom of this that way you don't get them effed up this is for you because if you send Xbox Playstation pitch gets a little awkward so make sure you actually put because they're all different pitch documents by the way make sure you label which one it is so you don't strip your filenames so this is these are example pages you can't read any of them but these are sort of what our pages look like for our Overland pitch documents that we did like two years ago year ago this far one has information in paragraph form about the game but it's only about half of like a long description the important parts are bolded right at the top and that is our one-liner we have quotes on there because we're kind of a early access first access game so people have reviewed it this second one has a it

literally says award-winning art direction award-winning gameplay which are true those aren't lies a hundred plus hours of replay which is true because we have people doing it super slick visuals which is true because Heather Penn's amazing and then it sort of goes down from there we also have procedurally generated gameplay and like it bullet points out really short simple features you want to give them features because they need to know how to sell it because they're going to take this information and shove it into some demographic thing which will spit out whether they can afford to get behind your game or not that's my last page I start with art I end with art and then I put stuff in the middle so what kind of deliver all of deliverable art goes into a pitch deck and their assets and this is another term their metadata assets

this is key art this is character art these are screenshots these are things you're going to have to prepare and you need to think through what they look like cuz you can't just open your game and like go print screen and be like good enough that's not putting your best foot forward you didn't think through that you're just like I have to deliver something this works think through how you want to present your game what's the most beautiful thing that you can put in a pitch deck what will make somebody the most excited about it so I'm gonna have some examples of the three games that we kind of already went through and how key art will change through the development process so these are all three versions of key our four night in the woods the bottom was launch key art and that was kind of good enough because Heyman to launch a little hot so this was all stuff Scott did really early on and it is beautiful it's colorful and it does

show the game this is especially important for pixel art games pixel art key art these are huge pieces of art often pixel art doesn't present well especially low poly pixel so Celeste they just did like this beautiful like I can't remember who they hired I can see it in my brain but they did this like beautiful piece of art for Celeste for their key art like external to what the game actually looks like that's fine what you're doing with keaur is you are proposing a mood you're proposing an art style you're proposing what the game is going to feel like and it's okay to do a painted like piece of art for a pixel art game for your ki art that's fine it's going to probably end up on like a 10-foot wide banner at a pax some day think through that how is it going to scale up so yeah this the bottom version that was our PlayStation I think we used

that maybe for Xbox and that somehow ended up for Nintendo because they were all separate launches generally you try to keep them the same but we couldn't find the bottom art when we went to launch later we had lost the Dropbox folder because I Scott had gotten a new computer and things just got lost for a while that happened with the trailers to is real awkward but all of them you can tell they're all from the same game from start to finish and also the white looks way better on the Nintendo storefront this is our current pit our current key art for Overland this is not my final key art though I'm not doing this I'm not redoing our key art for another two months ish that's coming at the end of content complete but this is what we're using now and we use it everywhere it has our logo and it has our squad of people and it has our car it has our dog which is very important

and we use this a lot and it can be cut up in different forms depending on where it's needed early Overland key are however looked like this and that's my favorite part when we thought we were going to launch it that didn't happen this is our tunic key our painted background it even has an old logo font on it we actually changed it for e3 last year but that's our old typeface we use this all over the place that's on a big giant banner at all of my paksas this is key art this is what it looks like and this is kind of how it's used so other than key art we have screenshots now take a picture of this you're going to want that because this is going to go into a ton of detail I could do a 3-hour talk just on screenshot theory I'm gonna go through a lot of questions that we ask ourselves when we literally post any screenshot ever okay I'm gonna go one two three

disappearing oh no it's not good shoot okay what is your game's main attraction aka the fantasy when you look at your screenshot can you can you answer that question and can somebody else does your screenshots showcase that main attraction does your screenshots show directionality this means can you tell where your characters moving does your screenshots show the movement there's a really beautiful thing that we have like you take any screenshot of night in the woods where maze running you can tell where she's running and you can tell on the screen everywhere that she can jump to just based on the way the whole thing is designed into the breach it has the most every screenshot and into the breach is perfect you can tell everything that's happening in the game by one screenshot does the screenshot show the main gameplay loop and into the breach is amazing at this where does your gallium spend all of its time what

is the player's identity and available actions what sorts of objects and items are there before during and after can you tell what just happened or what will happen can you read the directionality and lines of action in the game what changes in the game as you move through it this can all be communicated in a screenshot and you should ask yourself these questions are the environments or backdrops quite different from screenshot to screenshot is there variety in your game does the player identity change or shift in Overland that's the case all of our players are procedurally generated do the actions available to them change from screenshot to screenshot does a stranger need to have played this actual game in order to tell what's up in this screenshot do they only need to have played other games in your genre very useful for strategy do they only need to be vaguely aware of the notion of what a video game is that's Adam being cheeky but can they

tell in the screenshot that it's a video game like that this is actually kind of important for something like a fire watch they did a really good job of this but sometimes like if they had changed a few things you wouldn't know if that was is that an animation is that a screen shot is like what what is what do we do in fire watch and they actually did a great job sort of like going around that so that is a very brief screen shot Theory read the blog post that we did which we update all the time it's lengthy and it'll ask you lots of questions and has a ton of examples of what all these questions are referring to and we've spent literally three years documenting all this stuff so after you have your screenshots which you literally will put in that pitch document you also probably should have some sort of gameplay video we rely on trailers because we make them internally but they're very small we spend less than seven days on them and I have two examples of trailers from Overland that

were done about a year apart so I want to show you what things we were showing consuls and investors and the public from year to year in development because it's okay to make things better as you go so here's the first one oh no go back click on that [Music] [Applause] [Music]

okay so that was 2016 the game looks I mean you can tell it's the same game now but the art that is so early but we use that one for our first access but - we took this around I needed to communicate this game was procedurally generated and that the people in it were super vulnerable and then a year later after we had kind of changed a lot of the art style we went here nope no no no go back you are supposed to be here now over

[Music] [Music]

so those two trailers are back-to-back and that one's from like 2017 there's telling two different stories one is a gameplay trailer because we wanted people to buy in the others mood this game has a lot of different variety and I was using this to communicate to both the public but also publishers and investors I needed them to see the scope and scale that we were working on it is okay to do this you can change things around both of these things took like five ish days to put together and we did them internally so it was only on our own budget so once you have assets and you've thought through your assets you've asked questions about your assets and you've taken these assets and asked so they feel like this is communicating what I wanted to communicate don't be in

your bubble get your blinders off this is so important ask other people you're gonna have to send an email to somebody if it's publishers investors dev relations journalists for the love of all things holy pay attention to the words you say I get this once a month I wish I was kidding we were sort of making fun of it last year at the email talk that Adrienne and then we're doing but I do I get it all the time and that pitch might be great but wow what a lack of attention to detail so learn how and when you should contact possible partners I get pitches all the time I don't know why I take on literally one game at a time and I don't even have a slot for like two years I'm like no the publisher that you're

pitching to I get android games I haven't published an Android game [Music] ever [Music] I have games on Android but somebody did them and I just took him back and set up my own account after I had somebody else publish them so know who you're talking to look at their library like there are games that devolver should be publishing and if you have one of those games contact them but there's probably other publishers that are not super good fit for you so put don't necessarily put all your eggs in one basket but identify the baskets that you should even put them in in the first place so a question I get asked all the time is should and we're getting close should I put my budget in my pitch document no unless you were asked for it don't put a budget in a pitch document you want them excited about your game you want their eyes to glass over and then you want them to ask for a budget things you should put in

though duration of a project how many staff you got tell me about your team and how cool you are and later when you are doing your budget other things you should add is sort of how much your staff costs each month you do want to track in your future budget building equipment and like services so like legal accounting whatever which is also legal and accounting so services how much this is maya costs in unity and if you're really unfortunate all the insurance you have to take that's the kind of stuff you do need to put on your budget but literally do not stick this in your pitch dock it's not necessarily in this to ask for it you can send over an Excel spreadsheet with this you don't got to make it fancy it just needs to have numbers because that's what they're gonna look at they're crunching numbers in an Excel document I can send it off in a PDF so yeah don't send a budget unless you're asked for a budget okay so

understand what you're making spend time on this talk to people understand the people you're talking to journalists are different from dev relations who are different from the random person who walks by your booth practice talking to these people think about the ways that you'll communicate the ideas about your game understand the pitch build your pitch so its exemplifying your game that it's the most exciting thing that you can possibly put together that you get excited when you read it understand the pitch and who the person is on the other side receiving it what are their end goals and communicate that that you are your goals are going to overlap and understand your deliverables so you don't need to turn in a pitch document tomorrow because you're already sitting on assets that you've thought through today so you can just pull them out of a Dropbox folder somewhere and build your document last minute is obvious we can see it and seriously good luck it's hard

use friends get mentorship you guys can do this you have the games to build this stuff thank you [Applause]