Assignment 3
Concept Document
Due: Saturday, February 8th at 11:59 pm
For this assignment teams will submit a concept document for a game. Our format
for this document will be slightly different than it was for CS/INFO 3152. In that class,
you submitted a traditional 2-3 page document. This time around you will be creating
slides that will be used for a talk and the documentation.
Later in the term, this assignment will morph into a video (more on that later). Thus,
in this week of brainstorming, idea generation, sketching, meetings, and team work,
everyone should be taking pictures, shooting video with their cameras, writing down
ideas in notebooks or e-formats so that those artifacts can be part of your final video
at the end of the term.
Teams will submit the concept slide document on Saturday. We call this a "deck doc."
However, during the week just before, you will be using that slide deck for a brief
pitch talk. That pitch talk will not be graded.
Rather, it will provide two speakers with a bit of practice. Other team members will get
practice later in the term.
The key element for success is to remember the audience the the team's slide
document: a potential investor or publisher. This is your Shark Tank moment.
These slides are supposed to be a presentation that you might make to secure
funding. Everything should still be short and to the point without excessive text. Sketches
that provide a vision for the game's feel and basic play are welcome, but do not overload
your potential publisher with details about game mechanics or software architecture.
Game publishers don't care about the mechanics or architecture. They just want to know
if the game is fun and if it will sell.
Deck Doc Format
The format of this assignment was inspired by the Concept Document for the iPad game
Project Aurora
(later retitled Alone in the Light). This project was proposed by a GDIAC alum
who has since gone on to become a successful designer. Soon after that document was
created, we received
Over the Arctic Hills
which set the template for the modern document. We will use that document, and more
recent ones, as running examples throughout these instructions.
Title Slide/Page
The title slide/page should have the project name (e.g. the working title for the game) as
well as the team's "studio name.” Do not put the names of any of your team mates on this
page (For the Project Aurora example, Chelsea's name is on this document because she was
a non-student recruiting students from the course to work on her project). Use the design
shown in Arctic Hills or more recent documents.
Think of your publisher. What would get this person’s attention during this opening gesture?
A picture of a concept? A tag line? The opener shouldn’t be boring. The team should
brainstorm and put forth an opening that will catch the attention of a jaded investor
who has money to invest.
Big Picture
Again, keeping with the idea that visuals and design are compelling, provide the investor
with visuals and basic information that will inform an investment decision. The structure
used by Project Aurora is good, and so is that of
Coalide.
On this second slide, teams should indicate the platform, genre, and release date.
You do not need to give the language or development tools (that is for the
Architecture Specification). You do not need to highlight this information more than
listing it.
Give prominence to the high concept statement. For those who took 3152, you
should remember these. This is a short statement of the core vision
of the game. It is one or two sentences and should be player focused. That
means it should describe what the player can do, not what happens to the player.
Excellent word choice here is key; your team is trying to inspire someone to give you money!
As a great example of a high concept statement, consider this example from
Family Style
in Spring 2019:
The restaurant is packed tonight, and you're the only chefs in the house! You and your
friends must pass ingredients, scramble for dishes, and complete orders amidst a chaotic
kitchen. You'll need to communicate and cooperate to cook meals like your restaurant
depends on it.
Note the structure above: one sentence to set the scene, and another describing what
the (multiple) players do in it. The final sentence emphasizes the primary design goal
of the game -- communication and cooperation. The design of the slide should emphasize
this statement and make it pop out.
Design Goals
On this slide (or slides), tell us what the team is trying to achieve in this game. Who is
the gaming audience, and how do you plan to reach them? It is not enough to tell us who
audience is; justify why the game will reach them. Otherwise you are just
going to tell us that you "plan to appeal to core and casual gamers alike," which is
meaningless.
Side note: Your players cannot be "everyone." Think clearly about who, truly,
is the audience/purchaser of your game. Some people like war games; others won't touch them.
Some like "cute" games; some won't go near them. Some folks will pay for games; others
never will. Drill down into your true vision of who your players will be and what they
are looking for.
Design goals are also where the team tell us what types of feelings or emotions you expect
the player to experience. If you subscribe to the Earnest Adam's "wish fulfillment"
school of game design, now is the time to say what wish you are fulfilling.
Look at the design goals for Over the Arctic Hills.
They have three categories which they spread over three slides. They tell us their
goals for gameplay, the intended audience, and the emotions their game should inspire.
You do not need to have this exact breakdown, but it is a good starting point.
It helps to have illustrations with the design goals if possible. This is a place where
Project Aurora
does well (and may go a bit overboard). After a single slide of design goals, it has
five slides on story accompanied by player mode diagrams. These story slides are
intended to support the claims about player emotion on the first slide, and do a
very good job doing it.
In the first version of this assignment, before the team has done any revision, these
will likely be simple sketches, not hame art. For this first draft, teams are welcome
to scan in sketches and drawings if they are clear and legible.
We do not want six slides on design goals. Give us at most two (brevity is an important skill).
Make sure that the first has all of the important goals. The second, if it exists at all,
should have a single illustration showing how you expect these design goals to be realized.
Again, look at how the image in Over the Arctic Hills highlights the emotional
impacts of the game.
Game Mechanics
Describe the core mechanics of the game. Remember that mechanics mean actions
(verbs) plus relevant interactions (environmental behavior), but you should not use these
words. Actions and interactions are designer terms, and are not meant for an investor.
Challenges can be included, if desired. Even more so than design goals, this is where
a player mode diagram is incredibly important.
Once again, Over the Arctic Hills
does a stellar job here. It describes the core action mechanic and then provides several
interactions listed as Additional Mechanics. For each mechanic there is a simple
but clear illustration showing off the mechanics in practice.
As a more recent example, Family Style
has a concise, laser-sharp set of slides (pages 5-11) that allows the potential investor
to see how the playstyle works and how unique it is. We also recommend slides (7-10) of
Coalide
as a great conceptualization of mechanics.
Finally, we would like you to look at Split
from 2018. This document shows that sketches can be effective means to convey complex
ideas for early game promotion. Not everything needs to look like a finished screenshot.
When writing this section, please do not default to using bullets for this section. None
of the examples above use bullet points because it is just one idea per slide (or half
of a slide). If you do use bullet points, remember to follow the
writing guidelines
and use them correctly.
Competitive Analysis
Those of you who had 3152 understand that there was a similar competitive analysis in 3152.
In this section, we want teams to take a serious look at current market competition.
Which games are most like your propsed game? What makes your game uniquely appealing? In
particular, we want teams to identify some games that have similar audiences
(so no AAA $30 mobile games), and answer the following questions.
-
Why does your game share the same market/audience as this competitor?
-
Why will your game appeal to people in this audience?
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What differentiates your game from this competitor?
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What price point should your game be, based on this competitor?
To design this section, we have provided you with a
Competitive Analysis Worksheet
to help you. In the Google Drive folder, each team should recreate and fill out this
worksheet completely. This worksheet gives each team an organized, logical way to
compare the proposed game to other games out there. Seeing the qualities of the various
games in a comparison table provides an overview for the team that may be otherwise
somewhat scattered.
Once that table is complete, pull out the most important bits and translate your findings
into the Concept Document. We do not want you to just copy the worksheet directly in
to the slides. Each team should present the material well so that the important issues
pop out. Is your game too much like Game XYZ? Who really are
your players? Why do strategy games seem to appeal to players in ABC demographic? How
do we reach those players? Is any cost too much for this game?
Look to Laser Penguins for a good example of
going in to detail about your competiton. Howver, another interesting approach is from
Squeak & Swipe.
You will notice that the competition section is very terse but it conveys everything that
we need to know.
More recently, the 2019 game Stelliform.
provides a strong balance between these two approaches. This game keeps the competitive
analysis short and sweet, but with enough details to reach an investor not familiar with
other games. It uses strong wording to promote its strength versus games already on the
market. The visual design also helps the audience to parse the information quickly.
This section will ask for screenshots. Because you are getting screenshots from other
sources, the sources need to give credit where credit is due. There are two ways teams
can choose to accomplish this important step:
-
Add a final "Sources" slide that has links to the games or websites where you gathered the screenshots.
-
Hotlink the visual itself to the original source in each slide.
If you do the former, you should organize this Sources section in a way that makes it very
clear which hotlink goes with which screenshot or visual. Beyond that, we will not ask
for these to be formatted in a particular way (we will save that for later).
Other Details
We do not require any additional slides, but sometimes you have information that you feel
is critical to your pitch. And example of such a section can be found in the concept document for
Aphelion
(originally Project Mainframe). This document ends with an outline of their
proposed level progression, giving us some idea of how the game will proceed. It is
short and to-the-point, which is what we are looking for.
Conclusion
The last slide should close out the pitch. Remember, this slide deck is both spoken and
seen. Teams need a concluding gesture and a slide that allows them to say, "Are there any
questions?" Look to the last slide on
Discarded
for a graceful version of this.
Presentation Style
As always, the concept document is not a treatise. It is a pitch document in order
to secure funding for your game. It should be easy to understand, punchy, clear, and direct.
Notice how the examples have short, but descriptive, sentences. Any text should
effectively convey information so that we do not need a person presenting it to
understand what is going on; that is, have just enough text so that someone missing the
pitch meeting could look at the slides and be knowledgable about your proposed game idea.
Use bullets sparingly, if you use them at all. Bring them in one by one as needed,
and follow the other advice provided in ENGRC lab.
If you are unsure about our requirements, we have included some
writing guidelines
to help you with the documents in this course. This should make our expectations
clearer. While most of you have already satisfied the technical writing requirement,
we will still grade all of this assignments like an official technical writing
course. Take these style guidelines seriously.
Pay attention to the guidelines for
bullet points.
You should never have a call for more than three levels of nested bullets. If
you do, your should rethink about how to split this information over several slides.
In addition, presentations should use a font size of at least 20 points. If you need
a smaller font, you have too too much information on the slide.
Google Slides to create the deck/doc. Do not overuse
flashy graphics that detract from the information; only show what you need. Pick a
background style that is complimentary, but does not overpower the team’s pitch. The
focus should be on the game inventors, not the slides.
Examples
We have quite a few good examples for you to look at. However, as is always the case in this
class, use these examples for inspiration but do not emulate them.
Family Style
The pitch slides for 2019's Cluck, Cluck, Moose, act as both pages of a document
and as workable slides for a talk. They use nicely-formed packages of information
with pairings that work well. The high concept is paired with tech details. The Audience
target is paired with the emotions the game aims to draw out. Later, the team switched
to one main idea per page. The competitive analysis is brief and highlights how
Cluck, Cluck, Moose tops its competitors.
The viral sensation and 2019 Audience winner Family Style is another good example
from the same year. It has an extremely strong and clear presentation of its gameplay
mechanics. You learn everything you know to play, but the document does not get bogged
down in complex game design jargon.
Stranger Seas is another game from 2019. The pitch slides for this game
also balance the needs acting as a document and supporting a talk. In the Design Goals
section, the simple approach is striking and allows comprehension as a document while
not being overbearing during a talk. Note, too, that this team included sources cited
at the end for the screenshots and icons they used, which is an important move.
Coalide was the audience favorite in the the mobile division during the
2018 showcase. It had very simple mobile controls but also had a lot of similarities
to other games on the market. That is why their competitive analysis was so important.
The game Split won "Most Polished" in the mobile division during the 2018 showcase.
We provide this example as a way for this year’s teams to see that sketches can be
effective means to convey complex ideas for early game promotion. Look at the Game
Mechanics section and see that not everything needs to look like a finished screenshot.
Over the Artic Hills won "Most Innovative Game" in the mobile division during the
2014 showcase. It is also the one of the first good examples of a concept document
in 4152. It is clear, concise, and has excellent illustrations to emphasize its main
points. It also uses bullet points effectively, avoiding our main concerns.
Laser Penguins was the audience favorite in the the mobile division during the
2017 showcase. It is a cross-platform networked game that has fast top-down shooter
combat. It is a clean and simple concept document.
Squeak & Swipe won "Most Innovative Game" in the mobile division during the
2016 showcase. This concept document is a very tight document with just the right amount
of information -- no more or no less. You should particularly pay attention to the
Competition section.
Submission
Due: Saturday, February 8th at 11:59 pm
There are two steps to handing in this assignment. The first step is to submit the file.
From your Google Drive, teams should convert and then submit a PDF file called
conceptdocument.pdf containing all of the
information above. We ask that the file be a PDF so that we can annotate it and return
it with feedback for possible revision. Understand, too, that the grading team will be
looking at your Google Drive to evaluate the equal and fair writing and editing
contributions by all team members. This is done by opening up the revision history in
the Google Doc.
The second step is to complete the CATME survey. Later in the semester, we will distribute
these surveys at the same time that your two-week report is due, but we want an initial
survey to see how your group is doing. You should recieve an e-mail instructing you how
to fill out the survey. The link inside that email is
specific to each student. Use it to enter the survey (you cannot log in using another method).
You should do this within three days of getting the survey link. You will earn 10 points
towards your participation grade for completing the CATME: five points for doing the radio
buttons and five points for doing the comments at the end of the CATME. Do this on time
and don't ask for the survey to be re-opened because you forgot to do it. If you forget,
you forfeit the points.
As the prospect of revision implies, this is not the final draft of your concept document.
Teams will have one opportunity to revise this document. However, you should take this
assignment very seriously, as we will use this assignment to evaluate the suitability of
the team’s game (e.g. is it feasible, is it suitably difficult, etc.). If the team’s proposed game
idea is rejected for whatever reason, then the team must address all the our concerns in a
revised concept document within one week. If the game proposal in the revised concept
document is not acceptable, the team can no longer receive an A for the project grade.
With that said, this almost never happens in this class. We always try to provide extensive
comments on this assignment so that your group can be back on track by the revision.
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