Jonathan Grant

Post Casual Connect ‘08 Post

Our panel at Casual Connect was a pretty fun time – Teagan Densmore for RealNetworks organized and ran the session, with myself, Cara Ely from iPlay, and Tony Leamer from Oberon Media filling out the panel. The topic of our session was game design pitching – specifically, how non-designers can pitch ideas inside their organization. Cara, Tony, and I all used to work together, so we had fun ribbing each other on our past pitches. Cara specifically was the perfect person to talk about this subject, as she’s successfully pitched an idea (Dream Day Wedding) which she then built into a multi-million dollar franchise.

I was able to set the tone for the panel early by dropping the f-bomb in the first five minutes of the panel. Everyone thanked me for this clever ice-breaker.

Cara and I had a funny moment while waiting for our panel to start – we were sitting in the previous session watching a speaker walk through their slides. The speaker was talking about Seek-&-Find-style games, and mentioning that it was going to be difficult for indie developers to compete with monster franchises like Mystery Case Files and … Dream Day Wedding! This was a pretty big thrill for Cara since she created and championed DDW, from a few sentences in a concept word doc to a series of games that a stranger referred to as a “monster franchise”.

The real difference (besides the hard work of the development team) between the success and failure of a new concept is your ability as a designer to both personally believe in the idea and create that belief in other people in your organization. This process can often feel like building the top stories of a high rise before the foundation has been poured – a lot of times you’ll go home filled with doubts about your concept after a long day of hyping that same idea to your team and upper management. This can lead to unfortunate late night drinking sessions.

Of course, if your idea is a hit it’s common to find that people who had doubts about your idea are instantly converted into advocates for it. Many of these people will remember themselves as supportive of your concept all along. This is human nature – we all remember our successful “calls” in the past, and forget our many mistakes. The ephemeral and abstract nature of fun exasperates this effect, and the only test of a game that matters is in the marketplace.

To the point; it’s more and more clear to me that belief in both yourself and your product (without arrogance) is one of the hardest challenges you can face as a designer. While this effort is common across industries and professions, the nature of game design again makes this goal very difficult to consistently achieve. I’ll be exploring these ideas in later posts.